


Soon or Never

by softnoirr



Series: my true love and I find a way (soon or never) [1]
Category: Women's Soccer RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe, Amnesia, Angst, Developing Relationship, Established Relationship, F/F, The Vow AU nobody needed but I can't get out of my head, ish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2021-01-10
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:06:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 27,658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26813368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/softnoirr/pseuds/softnoirr
Summary: An incomplete and deeply fragmented collection of things lost in the fire. A fire, in this context, referring to a car crash which involved little flame but immeasurable devastation and wreckage; Several firsts. Too many lasts. The good things. The bad things. Tobin.It’s a very incomplete collection. She wants to live in it. She sort of did. It doesn’t matter, really.Or: Christen crashes her car. It gets worse from there.
Relationships: Tobin Heath/Christen Press
Series: my true love and I find a way (soon or never) [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2196819
Comments: 113
Kudos: 322





	1. Things we lost in the fire

**Author's Note:**

> A huge thank you to hiddeninplainsight for beta reading this and turning my sleep-deprived rambling into something coherent.
> 
> I did do research, and I did talk to the person in my life who has had significant memory loss induced by trauma, but, to be honest, this is an amnesia AU, and medical inaccuracy and handwaving is as much a part of the genre as the memory loss is so. Forgive its mistakes xx

An incomplete and deeply fragmented collection of things lost in the fire. A fire, in this context, referring to a car crash which involved little flame but immeasurable devastation and wreckage; 

i.

Several firsts. The first time Christen tried rock climbing, when she managed to split her leg open on one of the rocks attached to the mostly plastic wall in the entirely too crowded and sweaty rock climbing place. Filled to the brim with people who apparently found joy in exercising in more severe and dangerous ways than your regular jogging could provide. Ali laughing in delight at her misfortune, even as blood openly dripped down her leg and seeped through her sock, even as Christen protested her amusement while waiting for the cable to bring her to ground level.

The first time they met, about 46 seconds after she touched the ground, Ali still losing her mind over the apparent humour of Christen splitting her leg open at what was supposed to be an enjoyable afternoon out, a nice break from their coursework. When Christen was desperately waving her hands around her leg as if that alone would stop the blood flow, unsure exactly what to do, given the complete absence of a first aid kit, while still strapped into a harness hooked to the wall. When someone tapped her on the shoulder and Christen turned to see one of the most beautiful women she’d ever laid eyes on.

“You’re bleeding.” She’d said, Ali laughing harder still as she lent against the wall in hysteria, like it wasn’t the most obvious thing in the world. Christen had just gazed at her warm skin and bright eyes, at the laugh lines around her mouth and the clear muscles visible through her tank top, the paint smudged on the edge of her shirt, the ink under her fingernails.

“Yes.” She’d said. 

The first time they’d gone on a date, Christen sans blood, Tobin with sleeves. Christen hadn’t said it at the time, but she preferred her without them. It allowed greater opportunity for her to watch her arms as they moved, cutting like blades through evening air, easy movements controlling each ripple of muscle, all the way down to her forearm. The too fancy restaurant they walked straight past on their way to a hot dog stand, Christen on a student income, Tobin’s profession as yet undisclosed as they got to know each other. How the moonlight had lit up only a portion of the sky, but the street lights and the blur of cars zooming past filled in the blanks. The way her skin had pricked up to attention when they walked side by side, knuckles brushing and a smile she was only slightly embarrassed of by the twitch of her lips. 

The first time they’d kissed, when Christen had surged forward on a dance floor when out with all their friends, not yet exclusive but already special. Tobin had met her pace for pace and then walked her home, leaving her with a chaste peck goodnight before heading off down the street, whistling the whole way.

The first time she’d had a family dinner without her Mum. The first time she bought coffee from the bakery two blocks from her new apartment rather than the coffee shop on campus. The first time she’d moved into her own apartment. The first time she’d been able to call herself a college graduate. The first time she’d tried a tequila sunrise. The first time she’d dialed Tobin’s number ‘just to talk.’ The first time she called Tobin her girlfriend and really meant it. The first time she had an adult job. Even if said job was spending half the day with kids. 

Endless firsts. Firsts were replicable, for the most part. They just didn’t feel like they were. 

ii.

Too many lasts. The last time she called Tobin her girlfriend; which was also a first in and of itself, the first time she’d called her  _ fiancee _ , followed by the last time she called her by that title and the first time she called her ‘wife’. The last time she hooked up with someone without feelings or attachment or promises. The last time she had time to go rock climbing on a Tuesday. The last time she’d been purely by herself in life. 

The last time she went to a club because she could and because it was fun. When she’d kissed two different girls on the dance floor and went home with a third. When she’d drink vodka mixers all night and narrowly avoid the tequila which would have had her on a bathroom floor within seconds. 

When the girl she’d gone home with had asked her name and she’d say, “Does it matter?”

The girl had laughed and gone back to kissing her neck. Christen had felt as untethered by responsibility as ever. She loved it more than she had ever loved anything in the world. More than she was sure she could love anything else.

The last time she’d ordered pineapple on her pizza without starting an outright war in her household that would last at least a week and would certainly be used as ammunition later on. 

The last time every mug in the cabinet was hers. The last time she threw something out because it was of no use to her, not even thinking to ask if it held significance to somebody else. The last time she got home late without a text or a question. The last time it was only her name on the bank account. The last time she had nobody unbound by blood to love her. 

The last time she’d gone about her life calmly and with assurance, aware of each step in the process and how it came to be. What it meant and where she was going with it. The last time she’d scoffed at the idea of meditation. The last time she’d been sure she knew everything. 

iii.

The good things. Ali’s smile so wide it filled the frame of her phone screen over Facetime as she shoved the hand laden with a brand new engagement ring up to the camera. Ashlyn’s awe-filled eyes when she walked down the aisle a couple years later. The feeling of Tobin’s arms looped around her waist, cheek pressed between her shoulder blades while she made coffee in the morning. The smell of paint in the apartment when she’d had a particularly productive day. Her Dad’s humming to the radio while he cooked dinner.

An entirely successful nativity recital conducted by her second grade class. The student, Joshua, who she refused to acknowledge was her favourite student but who most certainly was, getting every single word of his two sentences worth of lines right. The smell of glue after an art class. The feeling of glitter stuck to her skin and the floor and Tobin when she got home. 

Channing’s engagement. Tyler’s wedding. The birth of her nephew. Meeting and knowing Cindy and Jeff. Cindy and Jeff’s vow renewal. Her Dad before he finally stopped wearing his own wedding ring. Her own wedding ring. Tobin in a perfectly fitted and sleeveless jumpsuit on their wedding day. Her Mum’s necklace around her throat, just about the neckline of her wedding dress, clasped by her Dad’s shaking but sure hands. 

The way her skin had felt sitting on the beach in Cabo. The painting of the strange mix of blues and greens and yellows that supposedly represented the calm they had in Cabo. The mimosas she had license to drink their whole honeymoon.

The purchasing of the most comfortable pair of pants she’d ever owned. Cooking for Tobin for the first time. The sound of Tobin’s laugh. The peace of realising she loved her job in a way she almost hadn’t expected to.

Tobin’s smile when she got her dream job. Tobin when she got her promotion. Tobin when they bought the car. Tobin when they moved and ate on the empty floorboards. Tobin whistling to every song Christen played on the drive to Jersey. Tobin’s voice, seeped in love when she talked about her family and Christen and art. 

Just Tobin. 

The sticky feeling on her skin in the middle of a concert for a band that she’ll later believe she’s never even heard of. Something like beer and sweat and excitement creating a film over her arms. The press of other bodies against her as she dances to it as the sun sets, the grass under her feet, the empty plastic cups nearby. The recognising of the person you want by your side. Her laughter when they got totally lost on the way home because she’s had too much to drink and she’s stumbling, but she doesn’t fall. They’ve done enough falling already. 

Adopting Morena, the wagging of her tail, the scruff of her ears, the jump of her legs. How bright but sad her eyes had been watching Christen through the wire fence. Abandoned in the world and seeking home.

When she’d waltzed right into the animal shelter and said, “That’s my dog.”

And the woman behind the desk had smiled like she really got it, like she properly understood, and handed her a pile of forms to fill out, saying “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”

Morena running the length of the beach, chasing the waves and the wind, as free as Christen could only hope to be. Morena when Christen tossed her the ball. When she sent it far away for her to chase or straight up in the air to jump as high as she could. Morena when Christen bought her a giant bed that took up a decent portion of their living room, Tobin raising her eyebrows but asking no questions. Morena when she cuddled next to Christen at night. 

A lot of good things. Too many of the good things. Mostly the good things. 

iv.

Bad things, too. Perhaps happily lost for many. She’s seen  _ Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind _ , she knows there are people who will lose the bad willing. Will walk into the flame with gratitude and welcome the warmth. Even if they come to regret it. Christen isn’t happy to lose anything. She wants to have everything.

Things like the agony of her Mother not being around. Things like not being able to call up her Mum after she met Tobin because she would’ve given everything for them to meet. For her Mum to hide her approval behind a sip of wine. For Tobin to charm her into open acceptance. Things like the mourning she didn’t get. Her Dad, torn apart and torn open by her loss, not yet fully stitched back together. The throwing out of the dress she wore to the funeral, when she finally decided it was too painful to look at it in the wardrobe every morning, and God knew she would never wear it anywhere again.

When the school lost half its funding and she had spent nine months partially convinced that she was going to lose her job, or the financially supported kids were going to lose their place. Being yelled at during parent teacher interviews. Being yelled at by a professor when she fell asleep after driving eight hours back and forth through the night to see Tobin. Being yelled at by a man on the street. Being yelled at by a girl she’d been sleeping with. Being yelled at by Tobin.

The fight they’d gotten in one Christmas, where Tobin would hardly meet her eye, but they were still around family and still expected to be adults. The whispered yelling in Tobin’s childhood bedroom. The hurt on Tobin’s face when Christen threw back vicious insults. The rawness of her wounds when Tobin hurt her just as bad. 

The times they’d struggled for money, a cartoonist and a teacher’s salary could only do so much. The time that she hadn’t spoken to Ali for three weeks because Ashlyn had been a total bitch at a party, Ali backing her up because why wouldn’t she, totally blown out of proportion until Tobin got sick of it and invited them around for a beer. The times that Tobin had fought with her religion. The times that Christen had cried in her car on the way home. The time that Tobin had been on crutches for six weeks. 

The time her sister had called her crying because being a parent was so overwhelming. When she’d spent hours consoling her while a baby cried in the background. Christen had no idea what she was doing or whether what she was saying could be in any way helpful. 

Channing had cried, taking all the air out of Christen’s sisterly lungs as she said, “I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to take care of someone else when I can’t even look after myself properly. I’m going to fuck this kid up,” 

It was cliche, and Christen wanted to ask why she had decided to have a child if she didn’t know how to care for one, but she sensed that’d probably be the worst thing she could say. Babies were a no take backs sort of deal, so it wouldn’t have been anything akin to helpful. 

Instead she’d sighed and said, “You’re going to be okay, just take it day by day, like Dad says.”

She had commented afterwards, “I’m never having kids.”

“Oh.” Tobin had said, swallowing before turning the video game she’d paused for the duration of the phone call back on and staring with a new level of intensity. The way Christen had bit her lip and made dinner but they’d never really talked about it. The way Tobin sometimes played martyr to her emotions. 

The fight they had between rock climbing and exclusivity. When Christen had liked Tobin but had not been aware that the other side of the equation was a little more dedicated to where like leads into love. When Tobin had told her she wasn’t going to do casual, and she needed to make a commitment. The moment of hesitation before the clouds parted and she remembered if it was anyone, it was going to be the girl who dug out a Mickey Mouse bandage from her backpack and taped it awkwardly over Christen’s bleeding leg before they’d even properly met. 

The bad shit. The litany of fuck yous and the road rage and the awful bosses and the even worse fleeting friendships. The time she’d almost broken up with Tobin because being tied down just seemed like so incredibly much when she was so incredibly young. How Tobin had cried into her stomach and Christen had ended the night with ‘I love you’ instead.

It’s a very incomplete list. It’s a really good list. She wants to live in it. She sort of did. It doesn’t matter, really. 

The list goes on. It fills oceans and packs out car parks and cuts down every tree in the world just to have enough paper to carry it all. Every second of eight years. Every conversation, every meal, every burst of emotion, every first, every last. It couldn’t be covered. It could fill novels and it wouldn’t be quite right. The powdered taste of her life on the tip of her tongue but never enough to put her finger on it. 

The list is ripped into shreds and thrown into the fire, burning to ashes as it blows into the wind, choking the casual pedestrian only trying to get home unmarred, as they all were. 

It goes on and on and on until it doesn’t anymore.

Until the car wraps itself around a tree and Christen doesn’t know anything about lists except the ones she writes Ali to save the debate about what they need from the supermarket and the ones she writes of which assignments she has to do for the day. It spreads out and on, until she hits the brakes and swerves until there’s a vast line of nothing when before there was something. Until the only clue she has about anything is the searing pain and the sting of sleep, the radio cutting off the crackling of Thomas Rhett songs. 

After that, the list of things she doesn’t know forever incomplete and unexplained, it’s mostly just quiet. It's sort of nice, in an odd way, not knowing anything. For as long as you don’t know that you don’t know, anyway. After that it gets sort of awful. But Christen, slumped over her steering wheel, head bleeding profusely across the dashboard and into her hair and eyes, unsalvageable by any Mickey Mouse bandage, even one provided by cute girls, doesn’t know what she knows.

All she’s aware of is pain and fuzzy light and strange silence in a strange car. The dark outside, the smashed in window, and the smell of burning rubber. The tree branch that’s half embedded in her arm and the way she feels like she’s already dead. She doesn’t know to be scared for her life in a greater sense than a life that consists of a beating heart and open eyes. 

It's mostly quiet, and then she doesn’t know anything for a long time. Not until she’s well and truly out of the car and out of the stage of dying that feels like a true death instead of a sick sort of April fools joke in the middle of July. Everything that has been is gone. Nothing to come makes sense. It doesn’t matter to a Christen already unconscious before the ambulance arrives. 

She goes gently, she’s found raging.

When she wakes, it’s to the smell of something of the same weight and scent of the mouthwash they force down your throat at the dentist. Christen almost chokes on it. She breathes deeply to try and rid herself, and then nearly sends herself back into unconsciousness with the burn in her nose. She doesn’t have the strength to swipe at the plastic tube shoved up her nostril but she sniffs at it, twitching her nose, eyes still closed as she focuses on getting the burning thing away from her, out of her. A flutter of eyelashes and a weak protest. 

She’s mostly unsuccessful, so she moves on to recognising how extremely uncomfortable the position her legs are propped into is. Her feet caught against the almost plastic feeling mattress, preventing her legs from stretching all the way out. Her blanket artificially warm but far too skimpy to fight the cold in her blood.

The lights burn their way through her eyelids, while people speak and machines beep through the soup of the air, lost to the seafoam washing its way about her head. It’s all muted, a siren's song without allure. Christen is torn between burying down deep and tearing her way through the surface. It’s burning on both ends.

Later, they’ll tell her that discomfort can be a good sign. That it shows your body knows, in some way, that something is wrong. That moving in the same direction as her discomfort will prove itself to be the most fruitful exercise. Later, they’ll tell her a lot of things. She won’t really believe about half of them for about half the time. For now, she just wants her knees to stop hurting and for the fog around her head to clear up a little. 

It’s too bright, and she’s too weary. Christen gives little protest when she lets herself fall back into a chamber of her own mind, surrendering to the warm embrace of sleep. It holds no questions. The burn in her nostril isn’t present when she isn’t awake to it, nor is the strange pressure grasping her hand. 

The next time she’s aware of anything, it’s the sound of solitaire on somebody's phone. The artificial squelch of somebody drawing a new card from the fake deck. It’s grating in a way that is probably reasonable, but it makes Christen’s head burn and groan in complaint. The sound isn’t really familiar. She thinks one of her TA’s plays solitaire sometimes, but Christen has always been more of a  _ Words With Friends _ kind of girl. It's recognisable, though. Identifiable in the crowd. 

Her head feels like a well worn drum on its final paradiddle. She wishes they’d cut the beat short. 

“Turn that off,” she croaks, throat rawer than it has ever been, dry and cracked as she tries to squeeze the words through. Her eyes stay shut, the idea of opening them too arduous of a task. She really needs that noise to stop, though, like, now. 

She clears her throat as best she can, and in hindsight, it’s probably a defining moment in the path between the car being knocked out of traffic and into the tree and the understanding of her complete absence of everything expected of her. It’s the moment when the room around her freezes and then bursts into motion, hands pressing against her shoulders calm but insistent. 

“Christen? Sweetheart?” Her Dad’s voice is one thing she’ll always know, a familiar timber she does not doubt when it cuts through murky silence. She doesn’t have much more than a groan of acknowledgment in her, though. A hand smoothes her hair back. Someone who is certainly not her Dad is crying. “Chrissie, come on, come back to us.” 

The solitaire stops abruptly. She’s rarely been so grateful for anything as simple as exiting a phone app. 

Her eyes feel heavier than they’ve ever been, her body is led tied to the uncomfortable mattress. She doesn’t know where she is or why her Dad’s here. She hopes she didn't miss her final. Hopes Ali knows where she is and isn’t wondering if she needs to cook for one or two. Hopes she hasn’t missed the frat party they’d been talking about all week. Her head aches, but she manages to slowly get her legs back into a position that verges on comfortable. 

It hurts, but she blinks her eyes open against the light, because some deep part of her who has endured years of school morning wake up calls always knows to snap to attention at those words. A part of her is no longer as distant as it was days before. The kind ones before the alarm became more insistent. She groans, but she opens her eyes, flutteringly slow. 

“Chris, oh my god.” And that voice Christen doesn’t know. Doesn’t know the mouth it comes from either, or the face that mouth belongs too. Has never seen the person who is leaning over her with concerned eyes to cup her cheek before in her life.

She blinks, clears her throat, blinks again. She sort of feels the way she does after a big night of drinking. Like any sudden movement could unbalance her, for all that she feels fine while lying still. Her brain fogged and her head weighing a thousand pounds, maybe add a few more. The stranger leaning over her just like the hookups she doesn’t know on the nights she commits herself to a walk of shame: unidentifiable and unknown. 

Christen turns away from the stranger who is probably a nurse that isn’t wearing scrubs but knows her nickname for no reason to meet her Dad’s eyes, “What happened?” 

“You were in a car accident, honey,” he says, soft and even, though his eyes are wild with fear because that was not the answer he expected. She’s used to giving the right answer, and that seemed wrong. Christen swallows a lump in her throat. She doesn’t even remember getting into the car. Normally makes Ali drive her everywhere or catches a taxi.

She cuts the stranger who has tears in her eyes a look. “Were you the person I hit?” She asks, voice croaking as the words spill out.

The woman frowns at her, a crease forming between her eyebrows. Christen vaguely notes that she has a very thick wedding band on her left ring finger when she rubs at her jaw. She really hopes she didn’t just kill this woman's husband or wife or fiance or something. Or almost kill her. “No, Chris, you didn’t hit anyone.”

Christen chokes a little while trying to clear the grating edges of phlegm in her throat and her Dad presses a cold glass of water to her lips, running a soothing hand over her forehead. The strange crying lady lets go of the hold on her face but clasps a firm hand on her thigh. It’s mooring, Christen would shake her off if she had the energy to do anything more than lift her head to drink. 

“I mean, someone hit you, but-” the stranger sounds angry, eyes ablaze and jaw clenched tightly shut. She’s got a clear cut jawline, strong and prominent as a complicated range of emotions flicker over her face. She doesn’t look very much like a nurse, or a Doctor. In Christen’s head, they’re always a lot more placid, concealing how they feel and what they think. Concern never slipping past a mask of professional distance.

“Tobin,” Her Dad chides, cutting off the stranger, who’s name is apparently Tobin of all things, mid complaint. Christen doesn’t know a ‘Tobin’. Didn’t know her Dad knew a ‘Tobin’. Wasn’t sure anyone in the world knew a ‘Tobin’. Christen doesn’t remember being hit by anyone. She doesn’t remember much except that she’s got a final. A final which she probably missed, which is not great. She really, really needed to pass that. She’s becoming a little concerned by it. 

She wants to be alone with her Dad. She’s making a concerted effort not to be rude to this crying stranger who is either a medical professional that is extremely bad at their job, or a deranged stranger her Dad’s tolerating, or even someone Christen almost killed in a car crash she doesn’t remember getting into. But all Christen really wants is her dad. She wants her Mum a little too. Wants and wants and wants. Something, someone, to hold her. 

Her muscles ache like they haven’t since she and Ali attempted to run 5k after having previously walked, at best, a 2.5km hike three years prior. She feels tied down and rigid, clawing at her skin to get out of this bed, and like she might never move from it if they let her stay. Her right arm is swearing, the bridge of her nose feels pressured. It’s too much all at once. Christen wants her Dad. She wants to know what's going on. 

She wants the stranger to leave her alone with her Dad. 

“What’s- I don’t understand,” Christen says, voice hoarse. She tries to shake her head, but it only makes it pound and a hiss fall from her lips. Both her Dad and crying stranger Tobin reach out towards her on instinct at the sound. Christen doesn’t know what the fuck is happening. She thinks she could fall back to sleep in half a second if she lets her eyes slip shut.

“You’re gonna be fine, babe, don’t worry.”  _ Sorry, what the fuck? _ Christen hates being called ‘babe’. Especially by strangers. Most certainly by strangers who are squeezing her thigh like it's supposed to be comforting. It’s anything but. 

“Don’t call me that,” she says, more a knee jerk reaction than anything. The stranger freezes, looking at her Dad out of the corner of her eye and then at Christen. Christen sort of wishes she’d wipe her eyes. “I don’t understand.” 

“Chris-” 

“Who  _ are _ you?” Christen sighs, shifting her head against the pillow. Stranger Tobin looks like she’s been slapped. Christen feels like she’s been run over by a truck. It’s possible that she was, she supposes. A harrowing thought. 

“I’m gonna get the doctor.” Stranger Tobin says, haltingly as she rises from her seat, releasing her hold on Christen’s leg, rubbing her thumb over the ring on her left hand furiously, and disappearing from the room, through the privacy curtain, as if staggering. As if she’d taken a stab wound on her way out. Christen’s Dad watches her, carefully closed off but with raw affection. 

Christen doesn’t remember ever writing a list. She thinks something catastrophic may be approaching, faster than her car hurtled to the tree. Faster than the truth to the flame. 

  
  
  
  



	2. It's hard, without a frame

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "It's hard without a frame  
> To understand how big the picture is  
> Just how big the picture really is  
> And if it fits"  
> \- Up In The Clouds, Skegss

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Much gratitude to hiddeninplainsight for beta reading this for me. Appreciation off the charts. 
> 
> Also gratitude to my sister in laws medical knowledge and her readiness to respond to messages which surely raised some questions.

The root of the problem is this: Christen doesn’t know what she doesn’t know. She has no clue what to know, what not to know--but most of all, why. No one even told her why Tobin’s here or what she is to Christen. It's a question she’s avoiding the answer to. 

Her last memory, the ever elusive white rabbit her brain chases after under the guilty press of a gaze, is of leaving the library with Ali’s sunken eyes following after her, demanding coffee with urgency. She’d pulled her jacket tighter around herself, dodged a grad student with a pile of books raised high above their head, and stepped out the door, and then poof. Nothing.

Bright light of adjustment, the feeling of water in her sock, the soles of her shoes so worn she could feel every pebble and each divett in the ground and biting air in her lungs. That was all she had. She opened a door she’d walked through a thousand times, and she has no recollection of anything beyond it. A swiftly severe end. A piece of her life caught in the door jam that she can’t seem to pull from.

Christen remembers her dorm. She remembers the piece of cardboard her dorm mate Kelley taped over their broken window. She remembers moving in with Ali. She remembers the toaster that always burnt one side and left the other inexplicably untoasted, failing to properly do its job. She remembers the overpriced textbook she paid for that she only read twice for a semester class. She remembers wanting a business degree. She remembers being late to class and being publicly shamed for it. She remembers a lot of things.

But Tobin is not one of the things which is why it’s so colossally odd to have this stranger with sad eyes and slumped shoulders curled at her bedside. Why it's so intently strange for the Doctor to not have her sent away under a confidentiality clause the moment she stepped into the room. It doesn’t quite add up to the picture of life she has. 

The Doctor, at least, makes a degree of sense. She looks at her with unburdened eyes. She cares if Christen recovers because there's a paycheck and professional fulfilment in it. A far removed clinical comfort that Christen much prefers than of the blood ache in the looks her Dad and Tobin keep shooting her. 

“It’s not uncommon, with major head trauma for there to be some memory loss,” She says, attention half fixed on Christen and half on the chart she’s flicking through, a pen tapping against the edge of it. 

“How much is some?” Christen’s voice sounds raw, like her vocal chords have been dragged through shards of glass off the concrete. A side effect of being in a coma for a fortnight, she supposes. An insane thing which has apparently occurred without warning or explanation. A moment of impact that tipped the world off its axis, and it hasn’t recalibrated since

The Doctor smiles, lips tight, “The date you gave me in the concussion test was eight years off from today, but you may find you’ve retained pieces of information or moments that you can’t place.” 

“Huh,” Christen settles her head against the pillow. Nobody is touching her thigh this time, at least. 

Eight years. She was twelve. Braids and pink scrunchies and scraped knees. Kids in her class still believed in Santa. She jumped on a trampoline in the backyard and had never been kissed. She wished she could go back to that, sometimes. When she was particularly frustrated with finals or girlfriends or the drudgery of being alive on days when time didn’t connect and your hands itched from the cold. Except, apparently, eight years ago she was 20 and bright upon the map of the Stanford campus, bursting with life and ambition. 

_ So, yeah, huh _ . That’s the only word she really has for something so absurd as this. Something that doesn’t make sense and never really will.  _ Huh _ , a blithe acceptance of the unacceptable and unchangeable. Here they are, how very odd, and how very cruel. 

Honestly, Christen should probably be freaking out about this a touch more. She feels like she’s watching through privacy glass or a film screen. Shaking her head at the cliche of the end of somebody's life. Hospitals are places out of time. They can tell her she’s missing years of her life all they want, but she’d been in a hospital a year and a half ago - or nine - and it looked exactly like this, so forgive her if she sort of wants to laugh at the situation. In fact, she probably would if it wasn’t for all the crying in the surroundings. It’s hard to freak out when you’ve lost something you never really had. 

Still, her arm hurts like somebody dropped all the weight in the world on top of it and decided to keep piling. Her head thunders with all its might, pounding against her skull and there’s Tobin. 

Tobin is just sitting there. Like she belongs. Like she has all the right in the world to burst Christen’s denial bubble. Like she can’t accept this reality.

“Is it going to come back? Her memory.” Tobin asks, and Christen’s foolish for thinking her voice was rough. Next to Tobin’s scrapey questioning and blurred eyes, Christen’s throat seems smooth as silk.

The Doctor gives her a placating look before directing her attention back to meet Christen’s eyes. “Most likely. The brain isn’t simple, though. You might get pieces back over time, you might wake up in an hour and remember everything. Or... Maybe you won't. It's a waiting game until the swelling goes down. It’s hard to tell, but the important thing is getting you healthy.”

It makes sense, Christen’s taken psychology 101, she has a basic grasp on the brain and how wildly unpredictable it tends to be. How MRIs can light up and if your Doctor shows interest in them it usually isn’t good. The fact that you can change your whole personality by hitting the wrong spot. It all makes sense, except for the part where it's Christen and there's eight years stretched out between herself leaving the library for a coffee break and waking up in a room of strangers with the bitter taste of anguish heavy in the air. 

Not uncommon, not explainable. Completely unpredictable. Maybe it’ll come back, maybe it won’t. Soon, maybe. Or never. Christen doesn’t look away from the Doctor when Tobin turns her head to stare resolutely out the window and scrubs a hand over her face with wet eyed fury. Christen’s Dad wraps a consoling arm around her, and Christen stares at the Doctor's sympathetically detached expression. Christen knows how she feels. Gets it completely. To observe the worst moment in someone's life and think ‘ _ oh, well, that must be tough _ ,’ but hold no connection to it. This isn’t Christen’s life. How is she meant to feel as torn up as people who are living the nightmare she's only woken up to. 

Her life is on the couch of her apartment, Ali in bed socks beside her as they watch reality TV between flicking through the syllabus and pretending to take notes from their textbooks. Some kind of performance to themselves of actual work. Her life is not in a hospital bed with the ruins of her car ruining her life, let alone someone else’s. She doesn’t even own a car. So maybe this is the end of the world, but the full scale meltdown is set firmly on the backburner, but in a way, it isn’t really. 

She probably sounds petulant, but seriously. If this is an episode of the Truman Show she’d love for them to just cut the cameras and call it because it's exhausting. She’s already feeling physically exhausted, she doesn’t need the mental and emotional toll either. A road toll ticking up and up along with her heart.

“Ok,” she says, after a moment, when she sees Tobin turn back with puffy eyes but no tears running out of the corner of her eyes, Christen cuts her a look and asks  _ the _ question she isn’t sure she wants the answer to, “So, who are you?” 

Tobin looks tired, her skin pale and veins standing out. Christen doesn’t know what to do with the unwelcome and unexplainable race of tenderness in her own veins. She doesn't know this person anymore than she knows anybody they drag off the street. Her jaw works, and Christen doesn’t want the answer, but it does feel a bit like an inevitability. Something someone had to ask or explain  _ eventually _ . 

“I’m your  _ wife _ ,” It's raw and desperate with a little hurt if you really paid attention, and Christen feels the hit of the crash she doesn’t remember in real time. Feels the glass of the windscreen break and splinter into her arm, a million little paper cuts too deep to ignore. A wide gash splitting her open and straight to the bone, bleeding and weeping as the metal molds itself into an ill-formed protection and the brakes give way beneath her scream. Tobin just sits there, and that's when Christen feels the world give out, feels someone kick the back of her knee. She’s powerless to stop it from happening. 

Christen isn’t used to not knowing things. Half her days are spent operating under the assumption that she will have the next answer, thrusting her hand into the air at each question and calmly dissecting the questions pointed at her by the lecturer. Answers are as much a part of who she is as her lungs are. As key to her sensibility as her middle name or the colour of her eyes. 

Apparently her days aren’t spent that way, though. Apparently it’s all past tense now. Except for the stranger claiming to be her wife.. She’s very much in the present. The present that feels an awful lot like the future. It’s all a little bit confusing, and scary if she really thinks about it. 

There isn’t a better way to put it though; Christen does not know. She does not know what’s going on. She does not know why she’s here. She does not know who the woman by her side with wounded eyes is, despite her claims and the grim look on her Dad's face that speaks support. She does not know anything, except she despises her lack of answers. 

Something tugs at her chest, some north pointing compass asking she just figures it out. A demand that she stands and follows the direction until she gets back to a place of reason and logic. The bedstone she’s looking for doesn’t seem to exist. Not among antiseptic sheets and nurses' insisting she needs to keep the tube in her nose. 

What she says is, “Oh,” and that's clearly the wrong response, based off Tobin’s drooped lips and slumped shoulders, but she isn’t sure that there's a good one. She doesn’t know and she doesn’t know and she doesn’t know and it repeats like that all the way through her chest and down to her toes. 

The world is a washing machine on its most vigorous spin, sending her through ribbons of soap and water logged fabric, in and out, up and down, left and right. A brutal cleansing that leaves her feeling dirty.

Christen’s head burns and her arm, under layer upon layer of thick cotton bandages, throbs. The antiseptic of the room seeps into her subconscious and she falls asleep to dream in linenum blue. She thinks someone was speaking to her. 

She isn’t really sure. 

  
  


***

When Christen wakes up, the room is empty except for Tobin. Her knees pressed all the way to her chest, head lolled back over her seat. It can’t be comfortable, probably not good for her posture either. Christen isn’t particularly comfortable wrapped up in blankets and pillows, though. Maybe there is no comfort amongst tragedy and hospital rooms. A sacred rule of the universe that you may never know peace whilst the world withers away outside your window, or, in her case, when it dies in the front seat of your car against a tree. 

But Tobin is right there. It’s still sort of odd that she is. A part of Christen was expecting that when she woke up it would have all been a mistake. A big cosmic joke ultimately resolved by the fact that Christen remembers everything as it should be. She’d hoped, and still there is Tobin.

Tobin’s breathing is shuddery and uneven, Christen doubts she’s in a state of deep sleep, which is why she feels confident to croak out, “Where’s my Dad?” in her general direction. 

Her head snaps up, eyes blowing wide open. It can’t do anything good for her neck, or any part of her as she almost falls out of the chair in surprise. Christen wouldn’t be able to catch her if she did go spilling over the linenum, can barely lift her own head, so she’s thankful for Tobin grabbing the armrest to steady herself before she meets Christen’s eyes. 

“He, uh, he went to get food,” Tobin says, voice croaky and face furrowed. She looks somehow worse than she did. Shadowed eyes and devastated skin. 

“Right,” Christen really wishes he would be here, but she does know what to do with concern for her Dad, and it involves making sure he eats, so she’s relatively okay with his absence if it's for his well-being. She’s a little less okay with the way Tobin is still sort of gazing at her like she’s the second coming and the devil itself perfectly intertwined. Either is distressing on its own, the combination is lethal. 

“How’re you feeling?” Tobin eventually working up the courage to ask, hesitant in the draw of her shoulders. Christen wonders who she is now that there's trepidation. Wonders if it's the present or the past she’s worried over.

“Awful.” 

“Yeah, I guess that’s, you know, what happens?” Tobin says unsurely, face furrowing a little more with each word. Christen raises an eyebrow with all the scorn she can muster in her compromised state. How in the hell did she end up with someone who struggles so severely with forming a single sentence? 

“When you almost die?” Christen meant for it to be teasing, but it comes out dry, and Tobin’s face contorts like she’s been slapped.

“Don’t  _ say _ that,” It’s harsh, rushed through teeth with a razor blade tongue that cuts through the room. 

Christen feels sufficiently reprimanded. It makes her bristle, but Tobin’s lip is sucked fully into her mouth and her eyes are set onto the ceiling, and Christen can only really feel a tinge of annoyance amongst her sympathy, so she just mutters, “Sorry.” 

“No, it’s,  _ I’m _ sorry, and for before, with the wife thing, that wasn’t-” Tobin lets out a long breath, “I was just really scared. Still am.” 

“Did I almost die?” Her voice is smaller than she wants it to be when she speaks, and she has to clear her throat and puff her chest a bit before she continues, stronger this time, “Apart from the memory and the pain no one really-” She has to swallow the words, her brain on a lag she can’t stop dragging behind her, unable to fully remember what comes next, what sentence follows the one before. 

“They told me to get the will sorted, so I guess,” Tobin looks weary and broken down for how young she is. There are dried tears cutting the complexion of her chin and pain in her posture. Eight years is a long time, but she still couldn’t be that much past thirty, if she was at all. Her skin, pale and sweaty in the moment, looks smooth and clear beneath the unprecedented circumstances. Christen turns to stare at the paper curtains that make a half hearted attempt at keeping the light out. 

Christen doesn’t know what to do with this sort of information. Isn’t sure where to put it. There’s no room within herself to carry it through. How on earth could there be. She feels like a kid, but she’s a dead woman walking and her  _ almost _ widow is looking at her like this version of events is slightly better than actually dying. Tobin seems nice, sure, but Christen isn’t whoever she married. She’s eight years off being that person, eight years she can’t conjure out of nothing, and it would probably be an easier death for this Christen to be buried by now, rather than walking halls with strangers. 

She doesn’t want to be dead. Not at all. She desperately wants to be herself, her real self, the self she left in the doorway of a library on campus. Or she wants to be in this room as a bad spot in the good life as the good wife. Christen doesn’t have anything to offer except absence and awful reminder in this world. She doesn’t want to have died in the crash, she wanted to stay on the road. 

“So we’re married,” Christen says eventually, mainly because the silence is hardly comfortable, louder than if they were talking, and Tobin looks like she might cry. She isn’t sure if the comment will make it better or worse. Isn’t sure about much with this stranger who is distraught at her bedside, but it’s worth a shot. Anything to stop the insufferable discomfort of seeing an adult cry. An adult she doesn’t even know, really. 

“Yep,” Tobin pops the  _ p. _ It seems like a thinly veiled attempt to deal with the tears and the wavering Christen definitely saw her chin doing, but Christen goes along with the casual tone, nodding as gently as she can without putting too much stress on her neck. 

“That’s nice?” Christen hadn’t really thought about marriage much beyond the abstract before. Always considered as something that lived in the chapter of her life marked ‘eventually.’ Eventually had apparently arrived and it has golden tinted hair and dark circles. It's the kind of eventually Christen might have appreciated fantasising about, but did not appreciate being thrusted into. 

Tobin snorts, shaking her head, but a smile pulls at her lips, and Christen counts that as a win, “Yeah, it’s pretty tight.” 

It’s Christen’s turn to laugh, a startled little thing that escapes her chest without permission and is cut off by the pain it brings to her head. She winces and pulls back, but a faint smile keeps her lips turned upwards. In her imagination, her future spouse didn’t describe their marriage as ‘tight.’ It was usually grandiose and confessional, romantic and sweet, but Christen will accept ‘tight’ from the woman sobbing over her very not dead wife who very much does not know who she is. 

“This is so weird,” Christen sighs. Tobin smirks, finally settling back into her seat, her muscles no longer contracted and ready to spring at any moment. She looks haggard, but her smile eases the knot in Christen’s chest just fractionally. It makes no sense but she accepts it.

“Tell me about it.”

  
  


***

The number one feeling associated with life changing automobile accidents is, as it turns out, boredom. Of course, freewheeling terror, lapses into emotional numbness and agonising physical pain make a case for themselves. A very good one. Poking and prodding her every which way in a bid for attention, demanding she be well informed on the intricacies of each. It's boredom that wins out, though. It settles on her, demanding broken bones take weight and unused muscle sends her running for the need to do something, anything, that isn’t just staying in a bed or walking the stiff hospital corridor under the observation of a nurse. 

They move her out of the ICU three days after she wakes up, when they’re finally convinced she isn’t about to slip under the weight of blankets and pressure to be a person she doesn’t know. When they’re sure her body won’t simply give out and give up. After that, it’s just a ward with ‘inpatient’ written across the signage and nothing to do. 

It is exceedingly dull, and Christen would like nothing more than to feel well enough to justify complaining about the painkillers and physical therapy she has inflicted upon her. She’s fairly certain that if it weren’t for the two hours she’s forced to do things like walk in a straight line and squeeze stress balls in a rubber smelling room she’d have collapsed completely. So she keeps her complaints mostly to herself. Mostly. 

There are daily sessions with a physical therapist, a speech therapist three times a week, an occupational therapist that reminds her how to use cutlery and pick up a pen and a standard edition therapist that’s there to help her ‘make sense of it all,’ whatever that’s supposed to mean. All of whom quiz and request and sympathise. Apparently ruining your brain is quite the burden in one's life. She’s guided down the hallway with a hand on the railing, and sits at tables to have the basics of life spoken through. It’s a low burn of humiliation while boredom simmers at its top heat. 

Christen is tired, in pain, and wants to actually be allowed to watch something on the box television suspended from the roof rather than just stare at the blank screen. Occasionally, she gets some amusement in the form of her Dad recounting story after story that Christen laughs along to while Tobin watches them with sad smiles. Her Dad cuts her a few looks when she asks, ‘then what happened?’ but she tries not to put too much weight into it. It’s easiest to avoid an emotional breakdown by just pretending not to notice. 

Tobin’s there every morning when she wakes up. Brings a new bag of clothes to switch out the old ones with. She lingers in the doorway and by the window and at the window sill like she’s constantly waiting for something. Which is frustrating, because Christen doesn’t think patience is rewarded in this situation. Especially not the kind that paces about like a tiger in an already tight cage. 

They don’t really talk all that much, though. Tobin flicks through magazines with fidgety fingers and walks with her and her Dad down to the cafeteria. She seems mostly content to scuff the toes of her shoes against the floor and speak when spoken to. Christen can’t decide if it's a side effect of not knowing her from a stranger or if it's just generally how she is. She can’t figure out which is worse. The fact that she can’t make that distinction only serves to frustrate her, leaving her stewing in her own boredom and migraines. 

Her sisters Facetime in, on a phone kept directed purely witht her Dad, the audio projected for Christen’s enjoyment. She’s not meant to look at screens of any kind, lest the irritated stitches of the fabric of her brain burst at the sight of too much light at once. So she settles for Tyler and Channing’s tinny voices and her Dad’s squinting at a screen she can’t see. She’s so happy to hear from them, from anyone she actually knows, that the news she’s apparently in Oregon - fucking  _ Oregon  _ \- while they’re in another state with kids and commitment and therefore not able to just swing by the hospital, almost doesn’t rattle her.

Almost. Because seriously, what? Follow up question:  _ why?  _ No offense to Portland, it’s great. It’s just contextually confusing because to Christen, she was in California a week and a half ago. Was sort of assuming she still was. So, Oregon. What a strange, strange world she’s woken up to. 

It’s fine. She’s fine. This is fine. Oregon is fine. The calendar being eight years off the date she remembers is fine. Her sisters having kids she doesn’t know is fine. The fact that her arm is wrapped in bandages and her head pounds at the wrong amount of light, well, that's actually way less fine, but she’s dealing with it. 

It feels like a collapse. A surrender of the accepted and understandable rules of a world well inhabited. As if society has fallen into disarray around her and nobody so much as blinked, let alone let out a breath. It’s too much and too little all at once. A distinctively familiar dissonance. Nostalgia without the memory, only the ache of something you can never quite reach no matter how far you extend. 

“You sound terrible, Chris,” Tyler says, voice crackling right down the middle in the poor wifi connection of the hospital. 

“Thanks, Ty,” Christen says, dry, but she can’t help the smile that comes with the bluntness of siblings. No regard for sensitivity in things like this, just telling it how it is. Christen’s Dad rolls his eyes. Tobin smiles into her muted game of solitaire. 

They discharge her after two weeks with a laundry list of referrals and appointments. The four pages of care instructions they thrust at Tobin are still warm from the printer. The thick bandages around her head are replaced with gauze on the deepest cut, and a nurse uses cold hands and calm tones to teach an attentive Tobin how to change the bandages on her arm. It makes Christen feel like a child, coddled and dependent. It burns in her like a current of unease. 

Christen doesn’t really know what a world outside white walls looks like anymore. Much the same, if the view through the window is anything to go by. Everything is strange though. From the state she lives in without having ever visited the wife she can’t remember meeting, let alone marrying. It's a strange concoction of suspended time. A resting place between the beginning and the end, and she isn’t truly ready to take that next leap with only the hope to land, but she’s too bored and too tired to sit still, and so she signs her release forms with a grip the OT would be proud of. 

What she actually wants to do is tell the front desk she’ll be heading back to LA with her Dad, but she’s not allowed to fly and Tobin looks so eager and earnest and devastatingly afraid that Christen can’t bring herself to do it. There has to be some kinship in terror, even if not the kind Tobin is pleading with her every move for her to remember. 

“Good to go, Chris?” Tobin asks, something like a smile, pulling at her lips. Her Dad had said his goodbyes half an hour earlier, since the Doctors claimed that normal routine was the quickest way to recover memory, and somehow he wasn’t a part of her day-to-day. Personally, Christen thought they were taking the replication thing a little too seriously. 

Tobin’s wearing sweatpants, she looks thin, gliding further and further away in the stale wind, glasses pushed up her face. She looks unwell, she looks scared. She looks like a stranger in the backlog of Christen’s life and Christen gets it. She does. The only thing she knows for sure is that for as awful as Tobin looks, Christen feels about a hundred times worse, even as she tries her best not to feel at all. 

“Yeah,” She says eventually, and is rewarded with a slightly more genuine smile and a nurse presenting her with a wheelchair. Christen tries not to let herself feel too demeaned when she lowers herself into it, but she hides her face behind her hair as the nurse wheels her into the elevator and into the parking garage, Tobin wandering close behind them, keys jingling between her fingers. 

Christen hates every part of it. She wants to pretend this isn’t happening hard enough that it will stop. So far, it hasn’t really been working out for her. 

The nurse puts a firm hand on Christen’s elbow when she helps her out of the wheelchair and into the front seat of a car she’s never been in before. A Four-Wheel Drive with awful green trim that Christen loses far too much breath on as she’s pulled in. It’s too high for ease of access and Tobin lingers behind them with a guilty look once she’s tossed Christen’s bag, filled with clothes she doesn’t recognise, into the back. Christen is halfway to panting when she’s finally settled into the passenger seat, the weeks of little movement and the fact that her brain hates her, along with lights, noises, and pretty much anything after one minute too many, leaves her exhausted by even the littlest of things. It makes her want to claw her way out of her own body, back into the safe haven of the hospital walls where reality is a choose your own adventure.

Tobin slides into the driver's seat without any effort, and that makes it worse. Christen turns to stare out of the window, watching as the nurse waves her a standard goodbye and tracks back to the elevators, pushing the vacated wheelchair along ahead of her. Her steps are purposeful and strident, like she has somewhere to be, like she knows what will be waiting when she arrives, the next patient she has to discharge into hopefully a better situation than Christen. With people who love in memory, not obligation.Tobin inserts her keys and starts the car, the engine coming alive. 

The parking garage is all grey cement and dark paths, lines upon lines of the same five colours of cars in all different shapes that are hazy at the edges. A garage filled with the worst moments in people's lives. Their hardest hours and most devastating days. Christen is now, sitting in the worn leather of the green car she’s never seen before in her life, counted among that number. She can’t make out any of the number plates properly. They lack just the edge of detail, the clear lines needed to make sense of the space. 

“I think it's affecting my vision,” She says into the silence between the console, Tobin glances at her out of the corner of her eye, “It's all fuzzy.” 

“Oh, shit, no, you wear like, reading glasses. Have for like, a year and a half? Strain made you short sighted, I guess.,” Tobin explains, sparing Christen half a glance and a strained smile, but she remains mostly focused on carefully maneuvering the steering wheel to exit the parking garage. It’s a smooth movement, casually skilled as she glances through the back windshield and pulls the car out between the maze of poles in tight circles. Her arms are tightly held together, cut muscle and tanned skin. Christen glances away and back out the window.

“Are they at your house?” She asks, rubbing the corner of her left eye to try and gain some semblance of the clarity she’s used to. 

“It's our house,” Tobin says firmly, jaw clenching. Her eyes remain on the looming boom gates. “You were probably wearing them when you were driving though, Chris.” 

“I’m guessing they didn’t survive,” It probably explained the knicks and cuts under her eyebrows. They were probably a mess of wires and glass along with a much larger collection of the same now. A microcosm of devastation. 

“We can replace glasses, can’t replace you.,” Tobin says easily, and Christen thinks it’s meant to be comforting, but it’s really not. Even as they pull out of the underground garage and Christen drags a pair of sunglasses the hospital had given over her eyes. The  _ her _ that Tobin knows, the one she’s worried about losing, doesn’t exist. Not now and maybe not ever again. The glasses probably would’ve been a better thing to salvage, from Tobin’s perspective. 

“Memory loss is a kind of replacement though,” she says plainly, watching the cars that join them on the road.

Tobin doesn’t shift her gaze even a fraction, but she readjusts her grip on the wheel, “What?”

“It replaces the Christen you’re expecting, don’t you think?” The Christen Tobin wanted was eight years older than the Christen she’s burdened by. It’s a long way off from the Christen she wants, the one she made promises to. Christen has changed tastes and minds about a thousand times in the last year alone. She’s sure the person she’s meant to be must have just about shed her old skin by now. If Tobin wants  _ her _ Christen, she’s not going to find her here. 

“No. No, I don’t think that at all, Chris. You’re still you,” Tobin says surely, coming from her throat. A prayer without purpose. 

“I wouldn’t know,” Christen doesn’t mean to sound petulant, but she can’t really help it. She can’t help the fact that the real world is so flung into space she doesn’t know where she’s landed. It makes her cold to the bone while her skin burns itself to ashes. She’s Icarus flying too close to the future. 

“Chris-” 

“Don’t. Let's just forget it. It’s fine,” She says with a hint of finality. Tobin looks anguished in the half second of Christen’s glance before her face seals back up and she turns into the steadfast presence she’s been this whole time. Silent and constant but completely inaccessible. 

If Christen had a choice, she’d forget Tobin twice. Wake up in a world without memory and without anybody depending on you to have them. It’s cruel. If she were a better person, if she looked at this person who she’s meant to love and felt anything other than confusion, any cosmic pull, maybe she’d wish to wake up with memories. She doesn’t though, she looks at Tobin and feels sad and sorry. 

She just wants to go home, but this road they’re on doesn’t lead there, and she supposes she’ll never get to be at home again. 


	3. A makeshift gauge

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "And I'll use you as a makeshift gauge  
> Of how much to give and how much to take  
> I'll use you as a warning sign  
> That if you talk enough sense then you'll lose your mind"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The one in which life is insane and this took me longer than it should have. 
> 
> Thank you to hiddeninplainsight for being amazing and beta reading this for me.

Not so long ago, and yet many, many years past, Christen used to scroll through Pinterest boards filled with home ideas, glancing at the clock intermittently and lamenting the time she continued to waste when she should have been studying. Somewhere in the midst of it all, in the many hours typing phrases like ‘cozy home ideas modern’ and ‘chic dream homes’ into the search bar, Christen settled on a two-story home with a black roof, plush cream carpets, and a kitchen with one of those giant drink fridges. Unrealistically elegant. 

It’s not really like that at all. This world where nothing lives up to your best-imagined fantasy. Where everything edges on a nightmare because the guilt of watching everyone around you suffer keeps you from naming it so. 

What she finds in this Wonderland of horrors is a house with a patchwork roof, a fence that isn’t quite white and picketed, the paint peeling away to show splintered wood, weeds sprouting around the bottom, a set of cement steps leading to the door. One story. Suburban. Chipped bricks and a hose hanging off a hook on the sidewall, water dripping slowly because it wasn’t fully turned off. Tobin shuts the engine of the car off as if they’ve arrived, but Christen has never felt so lost. 

“This is it?” Christen asks into the silence between them, and what she means  _ ‘Is this our house?’ _ It mustn't come out right, because Tobin flinches in a way that tells her the interpretation was a little more damaging than the intention, that it sounds more discouraging than she means. She wants to put a hand on her shoulder and apologise for unaimed wounds. She keeps them in her lap, unsure about where the sudden concern came from, why she feels the urge to comfort someone she doesn’t know. But then again, she’s supposed to know. 

Tobin clears her throat as she pulls the keys from the ignition, “Yeah. Bought it a few years back. Close to your school. There's a train station down the street that goes straight into the city. Made sense.” 

Christen peers through the tinted glass window and wonders if anything had ever made less sense. Tobin shifts her feet off the brakes. The nature strip they’re parked on leaves them with no choice but to stare at the house, and Christen feels a little like that means something, but she’s tired and her head hurts in ways she isn’t sure are related to the brain injury. She doesn’t bother trying to discern its meaning, just looks long and hard at the walls of this unfamiliar place and tries to fathom it as  _ home _ .

Tries to imagine herself cooking in it. Tries to imagine herself, with the hair that grows from her head now rather than the blonde streaks and straightened ponytail she remembers, walking the halls. Hosing the garden. Shutting the front doors, a wire security one and a wooden mosaic of scratched grey paint behind it, as she hurries out to work. Tries to imagine herself loving Tobin in this house. Tries to imagine that they share a bed, a life, and a toaster one of their relatives sent, a wedding present, maybe, with a white bow and a note written in calligraphy for them to promptly lose. Tries to imagine a bathroom where they brush their teeth at the end of the day before they go to bed, toothpaste falling past their lips when they laugh. 

She thinks she might throw up.

Imagination is a burden on the soul and the only thing she’s left with to make sense of the world. Except for the stranger who looks at her on a freezing clifftop as the wind rages on and has, apparently, made some sort of promise to guide her through this. It's not enough, and Christen still doesn’t remember anything that could make it enough. If it will ever  _ be _ enough.

It's a shell of a life, and she doesn’t want to live like that. She feels bad for thinking that way, but she doesn’t want to live with Tobin. Not this virtual stranger who wears a wedding band that feels a little like handcuffs, tightening until one of them shatters.

“Ready?” Tobin asks, hand already on the door handle. Christen isn’t, not by a longshot, but she nods and shoves herself through the car door, bracing for an impact that won’t be found in the torn-up ground of the nature strip. 

Tobin walks two steps ahead of her, through the narrow gate, kicking a rock off the path that appears to be naturally occurring, the battered ground making way to a guiding slope from the tread of the same shoes in the same place every day. It’s odd, to see the mark of your footsteps in places you’ve never walked. Well, you have, you just don’t remember. 

The chipped and faded cement stairs, where a wilted plant rests in a sliver of sun, aren't steep, but Christen pushes a hand against the rough brick of the exterior wall to guide herself up anyway. Her arm aches and her head is foggy, her lungs weak even with the slightest exertion. Tobin reaches out a hand, hovering like she might offer help. She must catch the way Christen couldn’t want her help, or anyone's so she shoves it back into her pockets, watching her closely as she tries to make her way, highly aware and ready in case something happens. 

Christen would be content to take years to make it up the stairs, to never reach the top, if it gave her time to remember how to walk them. There isn’t enough time in the world for that, though. There is a blank slate and a new address. That’s all she’s got and all she knows.

From the inside, a dog barks. Christen’s head snaps up at the sound and pounds at the movement. Tobin’s forehead furrows, gaze set on Christen, and assessing in confusion. When it clears in realisation there's a glimmer of pain there, and Christen doesn’t know how to say sorry for things that aren’t her fault, but she wants to. It is this clinical uncertainty that turns her saliva poisonous as it forms in her mouth. 

“ _ Shit _ ,” Tobin hisses on a long breath, head lolling back into her shoulders for a minute before she jerks up to look at Christen. She envies the ease of movement that comes naturally and with no ache, “We have a dog.” 

“Yeah,” Because, she doesn’t know if Tobin knows she lost her memory, not her power of deductive reasoning. 

“Her names Morena, she’s a good girl, but she’s gonna lose it when she sees you and I didn’t  _ think- _ ” Tobin looks almost frantic, running a hand through her hair and shifting her weight wildly like she might take off in a sprint with all this unbridled energy. The kind that forced your fist through walls you loved and sent your mouth to do dirty work that need not happen. 

Christen, still halfway leaning against the wall, is not prepared to see yet another thing expecting her to love on the other side, but she’s not prepared to see Tobin agonise over that either, and so she smiles as strongly as she can and says, “Hey, it’s fine.”

It really isn’t. It’s frustratingly bad. Tobin seems to buy into it, though, possibly because she trusts Christen, possibly because she needs it to be true. At any rate, she nods like she believes her and sends Christen a shaky smile.

She pushes a key into the lock, and neither of them mentions that it takes two more tries than needed, a keychain with a ‘John 14:26’ engraving clinks against a tiny LED torch as they both bang against the door. A strange song of anticipation. The dog - Morena - barks, sharp and happy, the scrape of claws as they circle. Christen worries that the neighbours will be irritated by the noise and then wonders why she cares. 

When Tobin manages to push the door open, the dog bursts forward in unrestrained energy, past the threshold, claws reaching for Christen’s legs. She’s tan, short haired and bony all over. Little white paws slapping against Christen’s tired legs with enough energy she  _ almost  _ wants to reciprocate the excitement. Tobin huffs, grabbing her by the collar, making little shushing sounds like it might stop the wagging of her tail or the wide part of her jaw, eyes looking up at Christen with unadulterated adoration and enthusiasm. 

Christen pats at her head a little awkwardly. It's a sweet thing, all loyally welcoming, and Christen is sorry to disappoint her. Is sorry to not have a single memory to tether her to this precious animal that wants nothing more than her returned devotion and good treatment. Christen can give her the latter, but, like most things in this new life, this dog is Tobin’s, and devotion can come only from her. 

Tobin waves her forward, bent slightly to hold onto Morena, who watches her, panting and gleaming, waiting for someone who recognises her to engulf her in their arms. Christen tears her eyes off the dog and takes a tentative step inside the house.

It looks like somebody's home. It's a silly observation because of course it is, but it's clear, from the first step, that people live here. Have lived here. That they eat in the kitchen. That they sit on the couches. That they laugh in the bathroom. That they love each other, love being together as it oozes from the wallpaper, which seems to be peeling off in the bottom corner. Strangers performing a play of domesticity. Some great escape from reality. You might call it nice, if you liked that sort of thing.

The floors are all carpeted, old and worn. They probably haven’t been steam cleaned in years, and there’s a stain half covered by a rug near the glass sliding door on the opposite side of the living space that the front door leads straight into. She doesn’t know what put them there. Wonders if even Tobin does. If they’re relics of them, of her, or of somebody else's history. Someone who remembers this place in moving boxes and the orange glow of a decade’s past. The same way she sees most things now, she supposes. Futuristically golden with the nostalgia of an unlived past. 

There's a plastic laundry basket, overflowing with odd socks and tangled jeans shoved up against the couch. Coffee mugs litter on top of a dented dining table, its wood like damp fibers pressed into the corner of the room, against the paneled wall with scratches from the chair backs against it. A blanket over the back of an armchair looks like it would itch, and the cobblestones of the fireplace are covered by crooked photo frames. 

Christen looks around and feels nothing. It's not foreign, not entirely. There isn’t the uncomfortable and unfamiliar smell of somebody else's laundry detergent. There’s no comfort, either. No sense of home or return. 

It just is. 

A lower middle-class household in the suburbs of Portland, Oregon belonging to a bank but, according to hospital paperwork, the residence of Mrs. and Mrs. Press-Heath. None of that, except for her last name bound by a hyphen and a car ride to somebody else's, means anything to Christen. It's an odd thing that occurs over her head in the midst of a bleed on her brain and a firefighter breaking the door off her car to extract her from it.

She’s freaking out just a little, sure, but the fact of the matter is that all of this is the extension of things she’s already deeply aware of being unaware of. Acts that continue and burn but are really just a low simmer of things she doesn’t have.

It's nauseating and awful, and Tobin looks pale, but Christen just wants to fall asleep and wake up in her real bed, in her real home, in her real world. Failing that, she might put a fist through the wall of this fake one. Otherwise, she’s fine. This is all probably fake, anyway. Hopefully. Certainly. But  _ God _ , it sucks. 

“You, um, do you remember anything? Like, of this place,” Tobin prompts, and there's a light of hope in her eyes that a strange part of Christen almost wants to nod at, blurt out some falsehood of  _ ‘oh yes, it's all coming back to me now.’ _ Tobin would smile in that way that seems to flicker in mere suggestion sometimes, and for once since she’s known her, be happy. 

Except Christen looks up and it's a blank room with laundry and half-empty mugs and it's familiar only in the sense that it is, by design, what most people's houses look like, and she doesn’t know Tobin, She has no need to make her feel better that way. Lying would surely only bite at her anyways, make things worse than they already are, even if it was owed or purposeful, and so she heaves a breath, shaking her head.

Tobin’s face crumples, doing nothing to hide her disappointment. Christen feels like she’s done something wrong. Something she hasn’t even realised and her stomach falls with Tobin’s expression. She hates not knowing which beat to match.

“It's nice,” She offers. Tobin jingles her keys nervously in her free hand, the other keeping Morena at bay. Her shoulders droop and Christen feels guilty.

“I like it,” Tobin shrugs indifferently. There could be something accusatory in that. It sounds a little like what Ali might say when Christen’s eaten the last of her tofu - the packet in the fridge marked ‘Ali’s very special vegan food. DO NOT EAT,' like an almost passive aggressive call out. She can’t be sure with Tobin, though. It's possible she just likes the house for how unremarkable it is. 

Tobin releases Morena’s collar, her tail still wagging but steadily more placid, and waves her towards a frankly excessive dog bed in the corner of the room. Morena trots over to it happily, tags clanging and paws padding on the carpet. She’s cute. There’s really no doubt of that as she settles down to chew on a stuffed animal. 

“You want a tour?” It's an awkward sort of question, and Tobin’s jaw sticks out a little like she isn’t really sure how to make the words last. Christen doesn’t, but she smiles and nods anyway, not sure of how to say  _ no  _ so she could just rest and escape whatever this is.

It's a simple house. A living room and dining room, a cabinet set - the kind you bought in a flat pack from hardware stores - making up the kitchen, the stove messy and a few unwashed plates in the sink. There's a water stain on the roof and a window with a sheet of cardboard painted with a green eye stuck over a crack. The guest room is half boxes, half desk space. A shelf of pot plants takes up too much space to explain, and all around them are photos.

In a frame on the mantle, a blur of black and white and wedding cake. Taped to the fridge, smiling faces and a mess of legs across cuffed jeans, chins hooked over shoulders. Blown up on a canvas on the wall, next to a messily painted canvas, is a sea of familiar faces, Press family members mixed in with people she doesn’t know but all have that same honey hair and big smile. The Heath family, she guesses. Now hers too, by a matter of technicality and affection. There's a few polaroids of friends and champagne and evenings well spent. Christen tries not to look at any of it too much.

She is not this person. Not this shadow of a self. It is her face, but not her soul, in those pictures. And it's just, well, it's a little terrifying to think that this body she possesses has been wandering around unaided, touched and pushed at and lived in without her knowledge. The Christen of those photos knew what she was doing, but Christen here, standing in this unfamiliar place, does not.

“Can I lie down?” Christen asks eventually, cutting through some vague chatter Tobin is making about some holiday they took two years ago. Her eyes have a spark in them that dims every time she glances at Christen to check if she remembers, looking for reactions to inside jokes that Christen only notices after the fact. 

Tobin pauses, arm outstretched as she points to a photo Christen is quietly refusing to look at, her eyes set on the faded wall above it, “Uh, yeah. You feeling okay?” 

“Fine. Tired,” Christen says flatly. Tobin’s lips move in a small jump of a sad smile, her eyes downcast, but she gestures Christen toward the bedroom, kicks a duffel bag out the doorway. 

The sheets aren’t fresh, and the bed looks like it hasn’t been slept in in a few days. All rumpled but careful blue. A chiropractic pillow laying next to a thin, lumpy one. A phone charger loose by the nightstand. Christen feels ill for reasons unrelated to her growing headache.

“I’ll make some dinner. For later,” Tobin says, stuck in the doorway like she isn't sure where to go or what to do. Christen knows the feeling.

Christen nods at her, and Tobin rests her hand on the doorframe like it's grounding her. When Christen sits on the edge of the bed and blinks at her, she winces and extracts herself with an awkward tap of the door, disappearing somewhere into the house Christen sees nothing of herself in, the home she’s supposed to know. 

She feels weird going through the chest of drawers. Feels weird touching the clothes that could be or Tobin’s because it feels like she’s intruding or snooping through somebody else's life, but she doesn’t have much choice if she wants something to sleep in, so she drags the first set of pyjamas she finds out and tugs them on. She ignores the protests of her arm and the torn parts of her skin as she changes, and falls under sheets that don’t smell anything like her.

They’re sort of coconut smelling. A tinge of spice. Soft from excessive washing but lines of fabric and twine that pull tight and grate across her. Christen doesn’t know which side is hers, but she settles to the right, with the chiropractic pillow because it has the most spice to it and her stomach calms a little at that. She pulls the blankets up around her nose. She’s asleep before she has time to focus on the fact that all of this is awful. 

***

When she wakes, there's a car backfiring outside and the blue glow of the evening sneaking through the curtains. Christen doesn’t want to get up but doesn’t want to stay asleep. She doesn’t want to stay in an unfamiliar place either way. A part of her considers sneaking out of the window and hunting down her apartment with Ali, half-convinced this is all an elaborate ruse and she’ll find her old life eagerly awaiting for her to jump back in. 

It's an idea lodged in the half space between wakefulness and dreaming, where everything hurts less but feels worse. Where her eyes are filled with sleep and her arm doesn’t yet know to cause her trouble, but her skin rumples and flakes into the mound of blankets. Morena, she realises with slight surprise, is curled up at her feet, head resting across her paws and snoring. 

It's a cruel and tumultuous thing to want, but it's what she’s got. She doesn’t think she’d make it more than halfway down the road, by the way Tobin crowded over her with imploring eyes and suffocating touch. The sooner she realises that she doesn’t know who she is, the easier this will all be. 

What she does, instead of fleeing the country of this love she doesn’t have, is disentangle herself from the sheets and pad out of the room, scratching the dog on the head as she goes, in search of the dinner Tobin promised and some semblance of sanity held within the confines of a typical evening. 

She doesn’t quite find it. There's a pot on the stove, now wiped down a little, with some sort of chickpea and potato curry. A bowl of rice with a microwave cover over it on the counter next to it, a dirty bowl bobbing in soapy water in the sink. She guesses the extra bowl is for her, the other Tobin’s, eaten fully while the other sits unprepared. 

Her attention is pulled from the stove, focus shifting where the kitchen opens into the living room and shaking breaths take up its air. 

The room sits in the glow of a lamp, warm and flickering, and the TV’s screensaver, stark blue that makes Tobin’s hair look like a white blonde at the roots. It’s a clutter of loose carpet and coffee table books. A soccer ball is half deflated by the empty and desolate fireplace. The bricks look sharp and jagged and Christen wants to trace the cracks with the tip of her finger, trace the cool comfort of burning buildings. A textbook and a diary are cracked open on the armchair, loose sketches over every half surface.    
  
All through it is the racketing breaths, soft hiccuping. Like some still life visit of things long lost to history. 

Tobin sits on the floor, only the base of her spine pressed against the couch, the rest of her caved forward and inwards. Her hair is a sheet over her cheek and her knees look red, burnt by friction and unclean surfaces. On the table in front of her is a stack of paperwork and a calculator. She looks half bled out and perfectly whole. Christen hopes she feels better when the morning comes. It’s the best she can do because Christen wants this stranger to be happy, for whatever reason, obligation or guilt maybe, but she doesn’t really want to be all that involved.

What she wants is to flee the room and the tears and the blame she feels right down into the marrow of her bones. It’s an excessive and damaging kind of middle existence. 

“Are you…” Christen prompts into the silence, not quite sure if adding ‘okay?’ onto the end of it would just add a lot of salt in a stinging wound given how obvious the answer is. Tobin jerks forward, what little of her back that was touching the chair coming forward, a gasp leaving her throat as she turns to gawk at Christen.

Her eyes look raw, tears leaving shiny gleaming lines like pearls drooping across her face. She looks torn apart, broken, as her voice comes out hoarse, “Chris,”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you,” Christen says. Tobin shakes her head, waving off the apology with one hand and scrubbing under her eyes with the other. 

“You feeling any better?” Tobin asks. 

Christen isn’t. Not at all, really.

“Are  _ you _ ?” It’s deflection, and Tobin probably sees that, but she smiles a little like she’s trying not to. She pats the space next to her on the floor and Christen crosses to settle onto the couch, a space away, her legs close enough to Tobin she could reach out to hook a hand around her ankle. She doesn’t, choosing to lean against the couch. She smells like coconut sunscreen, her breath warm and spicy.

“Nope,” She says bluntly, staring up at the roof. She takes a breath, opens her mouth to say something before closing it again, “Still don’t remember me, right?”

Christen shakes her head, pauses, feels guilty, and shakes her head again. Tobin lets out a long breath. 

“Man, I was kinda hoping you would,” Tobin says. “Is that bad?” 

“It makes sense, I guess,” Christen shrugs, not looking at her. It shouldn’t sting, the idea that Tobin might be waiting for someone new to appear in just the same way that Christen is, but it does, just a little. “I know I’m not exactly the person you married.” 

Tobin makes a wounded noise. “No, Chris, that’s not what I meant.” She heaves a long breath, straightening her spine, straightening her composure. “If you remember me tomorrow that’d be awesome, right? Like, I won’t complain. But if you don’t, that’s okay. You didn’t know me when we met. It’s fine. We’ll make new memories, and it’ll be fine.” 

Christen wonders who she’s trying to convince, and suspects it isn’t her. They’re not going to make new memories, though. That’s the thing. They’re going to die waiting for old ones. Christen isn’t ignorant to the way Tobin has been watching her impatiently. “Are we in love?” 

It's a fair question, she thinks. A wedding band does not make an eternity. Nor does it guarantee affection. They look happy in the photos that Christen let her eyes glaze over. That doesn’t really mean anything solid, though. It could be a trick of the light. It could be something that's long gone. Tobin looks at her with an expression she can’t read, all unwashed skin and aggressive affection. 

“ _ Yes _ . Like, heaps,” Tobin says surely. Christen nods, somewhat understanding the extent of what they have,  _ had _ .

“That’s nice,” She offers, because what else is there to say? She’s sure it is or was, but it isn’t now and they aren’t. It’s not her fault, but her chest falters like it wants it to be, and there isn’t much to do but go along with the drift of this desperate plea to which she feels nothing but numb. 

“It is, Chris. It’s really good. We never fight, really. We have a rule, talk it out. Write it down if you can’t say it. Your Dad says it's like, that never go to bed angry thing but on steroids,” Tobin says. There's a tint of desperation like at any moment Christen might light up and remember or flicker out and leave. Christen can’t imagine having to share everything with someone like that. 

“I know it’s maybe not what you think you want, but it’s a good life. I promise. We have a date night. You love your job, even though it makes you tired. The dog loves you. I love you,” Tobin says, and Christen thinks about a thousand questions. Things like:  _ What are your promises worth to me, you strange being in hospitals and unknown life? _ Things like:  _ Who am I now, really, to myself, not in the margins of everyone else's life?  _ Things like:  _ What an earth do you do that makes your arms so well-toned, Jesus Christ, what the hell? _

What she asks is, “What  _ is _ my job?”

“You’re an English teacher. Young kids like, nine-ish, I think,” Tobin tells her. Christen honestly may as well just accept that, if she’s going to accept any of this. It isn’t exactly a business degree, but she’ll deal with it. 

“You  _ think _ ?” Christen looks at the edge of the coffee table, the laces of a pair of shoes across the room, the chew toe in Morena’s empty bed. 

“They have birthdays. It's confusing,” Tobin says. Christen’s face screws up, trying to contemplate the meaning of that. 

This life, well, it seems fine. Tobin is nice. Her arms are ridiculous and she seems like the kind of person Christen would want to spend time around. Teaching is fine. It’s all, you know, fine. But it isn’t hers, no matter what Tobin insists as she starts eagerly pulling up photos on her phone and chattering about how lovely their life is, how spectacular. How they don’t argue much because when they have they realised they hated it. How Christen never eats pickles. How they met at rock climbing and never came unstuck. She knows, without a shadow of a doubt, that if anyone in this world had a choice between the Christen they knew a month ago and the one sitting on the couch with vague interest and extreme dissonance as she’s filled in on the details of her life; she isn’t getting picked.

That's just a fact. She’d be quickly packaged up and sent away as an uncomfortable footnote, and the Christen of choice would be ushered back in where she belongs. That's just how it is.

“Are you hungry?” Tobin asks eventually when Christen is staring dead-eyed at a photo of them at dinner with an older Ali and two women she doesn’t recognise. Christen makes a note to see Ali, to verify the stories she’s been told without connection to, and nods. 

Christen is hungry for far more than the curry on the countertop, but she eats what she is given, as she has been raised to do, and falls back asleep with a full stomach and half-empty heart.

***

There’s a lot of hospital visits. Appointments Tobin drives Christen to, smooth lines and careful bracing of the headrest of her seat as she parks. Christen with sunglasses snug around her face because the sun still makes her nauseous and she still doesn’t remember anything, though the former is improving. The doctors check her over, change her dressing, ask her if she remembers something, she says no, they nod and scribble something down. Tobin sits in the waiting room. Rinse and repeat. 

They patter off speech therapy once they decide she’s all good on that front. Christen sort of wants to ask if they have a treatment for wanting to scream about nothing and everything all hours of the day. If they can amend for the way that it crawls up her throat and tangles in her tonsils, choking and dragging, terrifying as she clings to the feeling for dear life. They still make her go to OT because her hands shake sometimes when she holds pens or eats a meal, and Christen wants to tell them that it isn’t the brain injury, but rather everything that comes after it, but she isn’t a Doctor, so she can’t know that for sure. She also doesn’t feel like admitting something so acidically sacred. She forces Tobin to pretend she hasn’t been crying enough as it is. 

About twice a day, she considers breaking out of their house, this dungeon of another version of decisions and affections, and trying to walk back in town. About three times a day, Tobin pulls her attention onto something else, and Morena bumps her leg with a tennis ball in her mouth, and Christen decides it's both not feasible and an awful thing to do to someone who is doing their very best to stick to a vow they probably don’t like being held to very much.

Tobin tells her about their wedding, and it's distant. She tells her about the TV shows they watch, and Christen can’t look at her phone because of the electric blue of the screen, and so she nods along to the recounting of a story she doesn’t know. She tells her that she loves her when she’s half-asleep, saying her goodnights as Christen sleeps in the bed - their marital bed, she supposes - and Tobin sets herself up on the couch, and Christen doesn’t really respond, because Tobin is already falling asleep and it's really only habit bringing it out anyway.

It is, by and large, a fever dream of a continued life. A moment where you thank the earth below you for letting you live but question in which way you should breathe as to allow that to continue, scare yourself with the possibilities so greatly you just stand still and airless. 

Christen doesn’t know all that much about her life. She knows more things than she did before. She knows that Tobin likes the colour orange and has a copy of the bible on the nightstand. That she probably can’t afford not to go to work, but can work from home just vigorously enough to make up for it. Knows that Morena follows her around the house like a grounding companion, and knows that she is, so far, the only person expecting love that Christen has to give.

In the world where Christen runs, she begins to picture herself taking Morena with her. She begins to consider leaving Tobin a note, or maybe trying to time travel to a point where they could meet on an equal playing field. Time travel isn’t real. It's theory. It’s logical reasoning with no actual evidence. It’s whatever. 

There's a jar on a top shelf in the kitchen with ‘angry things :)’ scrawled across it in what Christen vaguely recognises as her own handwriting. She suspects that it must be a part of their rule about talking everything out. There's a few pieces of scrap paper on the bottom. Christen glances at it one morning to find at least five new pieces of paper balled up and dropped into it. 

Christen hates every part of this. She throws up from the pain in her head sometimes, and she refuses to let Tobin hold her hair back. Just lets her sit in the discomforted quiet of the cramped space of the bathroom and passes her a hair tie. The world falls apart in Tobin’s knees pressed against the wall, her feet bare against the tiles of the floor. Christen is helpless to try and put it back together again when all that it relies on is her head getting it together, and that clearly isn’t in the works. 

It’s the sort of thing that drives a woman to madness. She feels well on her way to that. A bleeding wound rubbed raw by where her clothes sit. 

It’s whatever.


	4. Passionately, with a touch of tragedy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I feel happy, my love, and so strong — because you exist. I'm going to see you: that's the background of all my thoughts, and the meaning of all these days.
> 
> I love you quite passionately and with a touch of tragedy."
> 
> \- Simone de Beauvoir, Letters to Sartre

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What a world, what a delay. Please enjoy something a little happier. 
> 
> My immense thank you to hiddeninplainsight for reading over this for me. Without whom, this would have absolutely no grasp on grammar.
> 
> (also, as a note on the chapter; I like to think of the first quotation as Tobin's thoughts and the second as Christen's)

Christen is up to her elbows in photo albums, the wicker of the dining table groaning under the weight of a thousand days of memories and the pressure she places through her arms as she pours over them. There are birthdays, Christmases, weddings, and evenings in parks. Folded cards creep into the creases with little scraps of art paper showing shaky drawings, some by Tobin’s hand made obvious by the smudged signature in the corner, some by children that look just a lot like scribbles as they tried to write their name.

There’s a lot. A life in pictures and avoided cameras. She feels a little like a ghost, returned to a home she once knew to make sense of a life she has to let go. Only at every turn, through every unyielding wall, is someone begging her to hold on, cling onto the edges and haunt them all her days. 

She’d found them on the bottom shelf of the beaten up bookshelves, covered in a thin layer of dust. Her family flit across the pages, growing and changing from book to book. There’s a picture wedged into the book with the least dust coverings where she’s holding her nephew in the hospital, Tobin perched on the armest next to her. Christen’s watching the baby, but Tobin’s looking down at her. It feels private somehow, despite the photographer and the memorialising of the moment. Despite it being her right there and recognisable. Tobin is so unguarded it brings Christen’s defences surging up, but she can’t tear her eyes away. 

As with most things, Christen finds a hint of melancholy in which she cannot change. Most of her life, that sentiment has reflected the colour of the sky, the stadium country music, and the will of the world to sometimes shift you in a direction you hadn’t quite anticipated. Somehow, it expanded to fit into ‘life altering almost tragedies that make you a stranger to your soul and its choices.’ Funny, the things she could accept. And the things she could not.

That was, perhaps, the nature of being human. Hurting, hurting, hurting. Accepting, accepting, accepting. Even in denial. This open, ice numbed flesh ready to be taken apart with the shaking of a head. That you could see the end of the world and wake up to dress for work. What choice was there? 

Christen sees that absence of choice, that deep hurt wrapped in snared branches and tangled roots around uncompromising love in Tobin all the time. This time capsule of a woman with nowhere to go. 

She finds that she doesn’t have enough fuel in her body to fight this to the end. It just becomes an element of a breathless routine. Christen’s head hurts when she shakes it too quickly, the movement jarring her vision and equilibrium. Christen sits on a kitchen stool in Tobin’s office and watches her work during the day. Watches her long fingered hands pull from nothing but vials of ink masterpieces. Watches as she scratches a signature, scans, and sends them on their way. Christen makes Tobin sad. Christen tries to stay out of her way to remedy it, but that only makes Tobin sadder, and so they sit in this stilted silence where she can hear the chant of _ ‘I miss you, I miss you, I miss you’ _ but echoes back only _ ‘I know, I know, I know.’ _

Christen waits, numb. Tobin sits next to her, burning. Most of the time, she just feels nothing, but sometimes she lets herself burn up into oxygen cursing ashes too. Those are the times that Tobin strokes a hand down her back while she cries and jerks back like she’s been burned when Christen flinches away. 

She thinks about running, but she stays perfectly still. It’s on the knife's edge of nice. This unexplainable companionship. 

The photos paint an entirely different picture. They’re at ease, for the most part. People drifting in and out of spaces and frames. The ones hung around the house are similar, but there's something deeper to these albums. Something hidden and possessive to locking away trophies of memories you don’t need to prompt. These are the moments they would remember if they saw them every day and if they never did again.    
  
Except, of course, that Christen can’t remember any of it, in any way. 

It’s what drives her to create some form of chronology, tugging out pictures she recognises, the spare prints of her childhood and bright flashbulbs of her youth pre-Tobin, the youth she feels she should be in, and lining them across from the ones in which she finds nothing familiar. It's more difficult than it should be. Her life simply doesn’t fit. There’s a chasm in between beginning and end, the middle swiftly cut out without explanation, filled by unfamiliar faces and unreadable expressions.

She starts with her first day of school. She knows that. She ends with Tobin leaning into her, Christen’s arms looping around her waist as they grin at each other, a Happy News Year sign hanging behind them. There's nothing in it that she knows. Nothing in any of these years makes sense. Her name and face is the only thing she knows to be carried through. 

The knocking of the door frame causes her to jump, whirling around too quickly for her head's liking, to find Tobin leaning in the entrance to the living space with eyes tired and arms smudged from ink.. Behind her, the door to Tobin’s office, a carved out space filled with files and what was meant to be some kind of laundry room two decades earlier before previous owners gutted it, is open. 

“Hey,” Tobin mumbles, rubbing at an eyebrow and leaving a streak of ink, “Whatcha looking at?” 

“Photos,” Christen says, running a finger along the edge of them and her nephew, looking enamoured to a point Christen can’t conceptualise. Tobin peers over her shoulder.

“Oh, yeah, I like that one,” Tobin hums, “Are they helping with your…” she waves a hand around her in a circular motion. 

Christen knows what she means,  _ ‘Do you remember anything? Even a word?’ _ She doesn’t. Not at all. Has no recollection of this moment. Not the plastic feel of a hospital chair or the brush of Tobin’s body against hers or the weight of a baby in her arms. It’s empty space and imagined reality. She wants to though. Thinks that it would be a good feeling to hold and feel like herself. She’d take a part of herself at this point, if only it weren’t hidden away in some nonexistent place she can’t find 

She shakes her head, but leaves her fingertip smoothing along the edge of the photo as she points at another one, the two of them sitting a good space away from each other, a Christmas tree blurry in the background and mistletoe forgotten on the doorframe, “We look sad here.” 

“Yeah. You were pissed at me,” Tobin says with a slight curl to her smile. Christen can’t help the confused look her face forms into as she tries to figure out what’s so funny about that. 

“What’d you do to make  _ Christmas _ sad?” It’s a joke, but there's a ring of truth to the question, a point reflected in the hollow but honest sound of Tobin’s huff. Christen doesn’t know, the end point of it all, so she can’t tell what's going to be funny and what isn’t. 

Tobin hesitates over her shoulder, close enough she could rest her cheek on Christen’s and wind an arm around her waist. She doesn’t, and Christen wouldn’t want her to, but there’s something in the closeness that makes her want it. Intimacy with a careful touch. 

“I proposed,” She shakes her head, a crease of laughter in the corner of her eyes. Christen swallows all the words she has, blinking back at her in surprise. 

That is one story Christen would like to hear.

She opens her mouth to ask, but Tobin cuts her off before the words come, “You wanna go to the mall?”

Christen doesn’t know how they got to confused moments she can’t remember, but when she glances from Tobin in the photo to Tobin standing in the middle of the house that’s apparently theirs with ink all over her and cuffed pants that have seen better days, Christen understands why she loves her.  _ Loved _ . Why a version of her eight years ago and far removed felt compelled to spend a life with her then. And something twinges inside her that makes her feel compelled to now. 

“Yeah, okay.” 

  
*

It’s a fifteen minute trip to the nearest mall. Tobin drives without setting the built in navigation system, taking the turns and sitting in traffic with ease, whistling as the light turns green. Christen gets it, she really does. At least, she’s starting to.

The building is about as white and sterile as expected, with waxed floors and bright lights and a thousand stores playing a thousand different songs, combatting with the song being played by its neighbors. Christen can feel the imminence of a headache the second they step inside, Tobin shoving her sunglasses into the collar of her shirt, but it’s just far enough away, and Tobin is eager enough to head to the art store, that she’s willing to ignore it. 

She’s willing to ignore a lot, really, provided that she doesn’t really remember anything to begin with. 

The art store is filled with brightly coloured signs and paints that boast quick dry formula and ‘ _ blending perfection, _ ’ whatever that means. There are pens that cost as much money as a main course at a Michelin star restaurant. Tobin glides past them longingly, dragging a fingertip over the ends of brushes with fine wood and cold metal keeping them together, before moving to stand in front of a coloured pencil set. Christen slips past her into the aisle selling sheets of paper and stares at a stack of blue until it all burns into one thing.

It’s beautiful and hazy and the song playing over the store radio chants in tiny voices, a band musing _‘_ _tell me this is just a dream, ‘cause I'm really not fine at all.’_ Christen doesn’t know it, but she hums along anyway, watching Tobin as she pokes her head into the aisle, grinning sheepishly before disappearing again. A check up if ever there was one, as if she were a child who wandered off from their parents. 

Christen turns to focus her attention fully on a green sheet of paper and waits out Tobin’s fascination. 

When they leave the store, Tobin is clutching a tiny paper bag with a fine lined pen cushioned inside of it. She smiles widely at the cashier and then at Christen, but Christen isn’t ignorant to the wilting look she gives a set of paintbrushes on their way out. She huffs a laugh, shaking her head. 

“Artist itch?” She teases, smiling. A term she doesn’t recognise, but one that fits. 

Tobin’s brow furrows, mouth opening and closing a few times. Presumably catching up to the fact that her longing looks had been caught. “...Yeah.” 

Christen laughs, and they continue down the huge and crowded corridors, Tobin with a slightly befuddled look on her face. Christen doesn’t pay too much mind to it though.

The whole place is crowded. Packs of teenagers roam about, little kids weave between ankles, adults in suits with nowhere to be but with a driven urgency shrug pass them, clutching phones and wearing frowns that fit better than their suits. Christen focuses on placing the curve of her heel into the divides of the floor tiles with each step, Tobin wandering without a quest beside her. 

It's the sort of place Christen would have tried to get in and out of as quickly as possible before. Move in and out, grab what she needed and head back to campus or her apartment. Maybe only linger in the downstairs cinema or the line for the liquor store before a night out. She would’ve gone somewhere more determined. An activity and a destination with purpose. Tobin walks around with a comfortable familiarity, and Christen sort of likes that about this place. Easy nondirection with no destination in mind.

“You wanna get lunch?” Tobin asks, and Christen nods, realizing she’s hungry. She hasn’t been very good about paying attention to herself lately.

Christen gets fries and a burger. Tobin gets a burrito, but waits in the line with Christen while she orders, wandering off on her own to get her lunch. She reminds Christen a little of one of those cartoon space walkers. A lined tether connecting her to the ship, but a natural proclivity to floating off with weightless steps. Half there, half aimless, but this constant point of an awaited return.

The tables in the food court are covered in a film of half dried sanitiser and the grease of someone else's sloppily finished lunch. Christen suspects someone split their drink across it recently, clinging to the hair on her arms as she shifts. A few tables down from them, a five year old chews open mouthed on his hamburger, chattering all the while. His mother has her head in her hands, rubbing her temples. Christen understands the urge, but Tobin watches on fondly, twirling her phone under her fingertips.

“Do we,  _ did we _ , want kids?” Christen asks suddenly. Tobin’s hand pauses, her phone stuttering to a stop on the table. She swallows, eyes still fixed on the other table, glazed over in a way that makes Christen believe she isn’t really seeing anything present at all. 

“We’d talked about it,” She answers, careful around the words. Her jaw tight, and Christen wants to poke at it, run a finger along the edge and ease some of the tension. Instead, she dips her fry into the sauce packet, tucking that urge away. 

“And?” 

“You weren’t sure at first, but we were thinking about it, before, you know,” Tobin finally looks away from the child, now slamming his plastic toy along the edge of the table in utter and loud delight. “Probably won’t now.”

Christen frowns. It’s all so far away. Conversations she shouldn’t have to have. Things she is yet to have. Somehow, beyond that, or perhaps through, she  _ wants _ . As simple as that. A want and an ache. She half expects Christen - Tobin’s Christen, the one who's grown and changed and disappeared in a puff of burning rubber - to appear next to them, shove her out of the seat and settle back into place. A place where they would have kids and the house and Christen would know the little things Tobin writes when she’s angry and would understand what she had done that sparked it. Tobin would smile, and that would be a nice sight to leave this and return home with. 

“Why? I mean, if I remembered and the me that remembers-” Christen starts, frown settling between her eyebrows. There is a world where she comes back. A world where she remembers. Where this is a bad chapter of a good life and she stays. It’s not an alternate universe, though it feels like it. There's a chance.

“Can’t afford it, Chris,” Tobin says, a grim smile on her face, eyes settled just off Christen’s. 

“What?”

“We’re not - It’s expensive, you know, IVF or whatever. After the kid is born, too. So are brain injuries and car crashes and hospitals,” She sighs. Her gaze is set on Christen’s temple and her smile is fake in a strange, unconvincing way. It’s almost forced. “We have insurance, but you know how it goes.  _ This is it,  _ or whatever.” 

Christen swallows, recognising those misunderstood words too well. She feels immeasurably sad. She wants to hold Tobin, but she doesn’t really know how to, and so she turns affection into guilt and boils in it, whispering, “I’m sorry,” because it’s all she can offer. 

Tobin’s shaking her head before the vowels finish forming, “Not your fault. As long as you’re breathing it’s all good, alright? You’re okay, and everything else is,” Tobin waves a hand vaguely in a gesture meant to be all encompassing, that is still so little, “ _ Epilogue, _ I guess.” 

Christen nods. Tobin holds her gaze for a minute. It's almost assessing, searching for tells Christen can’t remember and complexities she isn’t sure remain. Tobin must find what she’s looking for though, because she nods firmly, and goes back to her lunch. They eat in companionable silence, Christen’s arms sticking to the table at every move. 

The little boy and his mother pack up and disappear into the crowds in a flurry of chatter and jumping steps. In their absence, something inside of Christen, something scared and uncertain, unlocks. It’s easier, when it’s not right there splayed in front of her. Things she doesn’t want, but wonders on not ever having. Wanting, she begins to find, is a traitorous voice begging for sense to be made and comfort to come with ease. 

Christen feels desperate as if she is in the perfect condition to drown, and yet the water never floods her nose, never pours into her mouth. Instead, she is left suspended in a state of near death. A threat so harmless it feels almost more friend than foe. Laying in the bed of her enemy and hoping that the sun doesn’t rise, that they can simply exist in this point where they know nothing of the afterlife, only that they cannot return to life itself. They may not die, but they won’t live either.

This awful unyielding almost. Almost hatred. Almost anger. Almost love. Almost sadness. Almost memory. She can taste it all on her tongue the way she still remembers the sandwiches she took to school every day, and can still feel the powdered gelatine of fruit roll ups. She can imagine it so keenly, as clear as the first time she’d tried wine, but despite the taste burning off the edge of her tongue, she’ll never get drunk off an almost more illusion than concrete feeling. 

It makes Christen want to claw through her skin, escape the entrapment and make a clean break into something full and realised; something that knows what it is and where it comes from. Then she looks at Tobin, balling each wrapper that had come with her lunch into the smallest form she can, and she feels a little less alone and infinitely more settled. 

“Hey,” Tobin says, pulling Christen from her thoughts with a gentle tug on her sleeve, “I wanna show you something.” 

“What is it?” Christen asks, wary of what it could be. Tobin grins.   
  
“You’re so spontaneous, Chris, like, a serious freewheeling adventurer.” It’s so light Christen can’t help the surprised burst of laughter escape her throat. Tobin looks smug, and Christen thinks, not for the first time, that Tobin must really know her. At least, the her that was. The her that will be. The her she’d like to live as. 

“Fine, show me,” She says. Tobin doesn’t seem to buy the disgruntled huff she tries to add. Not even for a second. 

Tobin’s grand reveal turns out to be a patch of grass in front of a giant wall of glass. Or, more accurately, a patch of fake grass put in for decoration amongst a concrete jungle across from the bus station, the window to the mall's rock climbing gym behind them. The grass, plastic pin pricks just on the right side of cool, sliding against her legs as they settle down on it. 

The area is mostly concrete and mostly uninhabited, the back courtyard that sits outside of a space made for consumption and quick movement. A pigeon roams about a few paces away, fat and unaffected as it plucks at the empty ground, gripping onto crumbs Christen can’t see. Fuzzy at the edges as most things have been, her eyes, still without glasses, just another new piece of this new person. A collection of newness that ages her to the bone. It feels ancient, this sadness, this uncertainty. 

Tobin too, feels ancient, despite how unknown she is. As if Christen has loved her somewhere in the past, a feeling she can’t connect but knows. That once upon a time there was a happy ever after and now there is this thwarted and agonising misery. 

Christen’s just tired. 

“We used to come here a lot, that's why I thought we should come here today,” Tobin says, sounding a lot like  _ ‘do you remember it?’  _ Christen remembers it in the same way she remembers stories from her childhood she was too young to truly keep as her own. Remembers as if it is a long repeated story, filled in with the wrong colours and details she made up all on her own through the interpretation of someone else's words. She doesn’t recognise it at all though, feels no true connection. “We met rock climbing,” 

“Here?” Christen asks, peering over her shoulder and through the glass. Tobin shakes her head.    
  
“Nope, different place,” She says, “But you used to say that, like, this one was just a connection to the old place, that it didn’t have to be the same, because we were the part that mattered. So...” Tobin trails off, shrugging, but doesn’t add anything else. 

“Very philosophical of me,” Christen murmurs. 

Tobin huffs a little laugh, eyes bright, smile sad. “That’s you. Your wedding vows, man, I think the whole room was in love with you by the end. I don’t blame them, obviously.” 

Christen laughs, and Tobin tosses her a private grin. They slip into a companionable silence. It's easy when Tobin’s right there, looming and stressful as she is to imagine that this is Christen’s life. That she made these choices that brought her here. Easy to imagine that she lived this life before she fell off the end of it. She hadn’t though. Or perhaps, she has, but she can’t be certain. Can’t be certain that she likes it. Can’t be certain that she was happy. Can’t be certain she ever will be again.

She wants to go home. She wants to know what it feels like to wrap herself up in Tobin, to understand what the past her felt in the evening and what she loved in those moments. Christen and Tobin have slept together. They’ve talked about having kids. They share a bed, a life, and a letter opener. All of those are true, but the truth is utterly subjective, because Christen and Tobin have had sex, but Christen has never even kissed her. 

This is a world of incompleteness. 

She wants to stay, but she wants to go. There is nowhere to go, and no true way to stay. Tobin lies back, arms braced under her head, legs stretched in front of her. The paper bag holding her pens is crumbled by her thigh. 

“Tell me something.” Christen says, pulling at the fake grass. She’ll probably find dirt under her nails later, but she’s not sure she cares. 

“What kind of something?” Tobin asks. She’s looking at Christen, and it's intense enough to be uncomfortable. Loaded enough she should probably squirm under it. Her chest feels a little warm though, and that's it. 

“Something you’d tell me if we were just meeting, if this was like, I don’t know. I mean, it’s not, but if it  _ was- _ ” Tobin’s laughter cuts her off, husky and low, as she shakes her head, tilting up to roll her eyes at the sky.

“ _ If it was a date _ .” Tobin finishes for her, eyebrows quirked and eyes gleaming with amusement. “I know you don’t remember it, but I married you, you don’t have to be embarrassed about wanting some of this. I know I’m irresistible.” 

“That is  _ not- _ ” 

“Yeah, it is, Chris,” Tobin shakes her head on a long breath, teasing and sad, light and burdened. It’s a joke, but Christen has spent enough time around the stranger she’s sworn to live her life with to know she isn’t quite happy to be making it. 

Christen wants to stop the bleeding of Tobin’s laughter. Wants to wrap an arm around her and tell her that it will all be okay. Tell her that she’s a good person and her wife will be home soon. Except Tobin is smiling like she’s fine and looking at her like she’s not because Christen is, in fact, that long missing wife, and she’s not sure there’s much to say. At the moment, it’s a joke, and so Christen laughs lightly with a shake of her head, and Tobin’s eyes crinkle at the edges when she laughs too. There’s ink under her eyes and Christen hasn’t missed the creases in her makeup from whenever the last time she cried was. She just doesn’t know what to do about the wounds inflicted through no fault of her own, and so, following Tobin’s lead, she averts her eyes.

“ _ If _ this  _ was _ a date-” Tobin says after a moment, when her smile is a little more sweet than it is bitter.

“Which it isn’t,” Christen emphasizes, but she doesn’t think Tobin fully believes her. And to be fair, she isn’t sure she does either. 

“I’d tell you that you make me happy,” Tobin says. Christen’s lips twitch into  _ almost _ smiling. Tobin runs a hand over the top of head. “No, like, I know you don’t think you do, but it’s-” She huffs. “When we went to the hospital, you looked at the triage nurse and you said, ‘I’m Christen’ and it’s like, my whole chest just said, ‘Yeah, you are.’ And I was so fucking happy because that’s your name and I get to say it, and the whole sky is falling in but your name is Christen and you let me call you it, so it’s gotta be a pretty good life. Even if you don’t want it.” 

Christen swallows. Holding a box filled with affection and burden, unsure where she might put it down. If she might be allowed to ever again. “That’s not the very first meeting appropriate.” 

Tobin smiles. It’s tiny, and Christen sees the stars implode and the sky opens up within it. In a way, Tobin might be the only one that understands. Her name is Christen, and if that’s all she has, then it's all Tobin can say, can be. If she’s happy to do nothing but use her name for all the suspended hell that they live in, then maybe, just maybe that could be contentment. Maybe Christen  _ wants _ to hear her say it again and again until it clicks into place. 

“It’s not,” Tobin concedes, “But it's true, at least.” 


	5. Near Death

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loving (you, recklessly)  
> Is better than an evening in wine  
> Is better than a drive-in sunsetting  
> Is worse than a cinema  
> Where I am in a row alone  
> Loving (you, recklessly)  
> Is something I know

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When I first wrote this I sorted of hated it. Reading back through it I’m actually proud of it, which is a nice feeling to have.
> 
> All the tiny foreshadowing no one ever knows about breaks and seals together my heart, but as a Miss Phoebe Bridgers would say; I know the end
> 
> A monster thank you to [hiddeninplainsight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hiddeninplainsight/pseuds/hiddeninplainsight) who beta read each and every one of these many words, and fed life and coherence back into it, all while writing very very brilliant words of their own which you should certainly read. 
> 
> Sorry for the delays; my life blew up like a hole in the side of a pirate ship put there by various canon balls and rival sailors. 
> 
> Thank you for all the love you’ve given this ill-advised little adventure of a story, and for sticking with it.
> 
> The poem in the chapter description is mine and I needed to put it somewhere, so here it is. 
> 
> Stay safe, lots of love. xx

It's a Friday when Christen finally gives up. 

Well, maybe that isn’t the way to put it. It probably doesn’t capture the feeling. 

It might be more accurate to say that it's a Friday when Christen walks into the living room of the house she mapped into her mind, carpet treaded until it stops irritating her toes, to find Tobin asleep under piles of blankets on the couch. The couch she’s been sleeping on since Christen arrived. Returned, maybe, depending on how you frame it. Christen mostly chooses not to frame it in any way at all, but it changes that same Friday. 

It could be more appropriate to describe it like this; it's a Friday when Christen realises that ‘Christen’, whatever she may be, is really just her. Whether her hair is blue when she wakes tomorrow, if it holds streaks of grey, or stays in solid dark curls, it's still attached to her scalp. Whether she changes her name, it’ll be her body forced to hear this newness called into cafes and listed on roll calls, on her taxes, at the hospital she’s lived enough time in to last the rest of her life, whatever that may entail. Christen will always be Christen, even when she isn’t the one they all expect. 

Or, she could say that it's a Friday when she looks outside and all at once the sky is blue again. It has been grey for so long, tired and dreary, filled with sunburns through windshields and raindrops from the stitches that form ladders etched on her arm. The ones Tobin can’t tear her eyes away from, face pale and queasy at the memory. The ones she sometimes finds Tobin staring dead eyed at when they’re sitting on the couch - Tobin’s new bed - together. When Christen says something that sounds very far from the Christen that Tobin remembers, or when she says something too close. When Tobin can’t return the favour, because Tobin holds her with kid gloves and Christen fucking hates that, but neither of them like the alternative - cruelty or familiarity or running the other off, no one is sure which it would be. 

That is to say; it's a Friday when Christen lets herself die, and it's a Friday when Christen comes alive 

It starts easily enough. It starts with dinner. 

Christen doesn’t remember being able to cook. She could fling together a soup or two off _taste.com_ and stir mean ramen into a meal, a few frozen vegetables added in for some pretense of nutrition in college, but that wasn’t enough to feed adults who ate not to tamper down drunkenness and clear their brains for studying, but for sustenance and health. Christen doesn’t know how to be that adult, and she doesn’t know how to cook. Tobin does. Christen knows how to pick music, and so that's the deal.

Tobin cooks, badly, if they’re honest, and Christen shuffles through a playlist titled ‘love letters.’ It's the only one she can settle into amongst all the music on a Spotify account filled with songs and artists she doesn’t recognise, and Tobin smiled a little the first time she pressed play, so it stayed. 

They leave the music low. It grates on her head otherwise, ache forming on her temples, sometimes in between her eyes The Doctor insists it's a side effect of concussions, perfectly normal and expected. One of the symptoms they’re certain will ebb off eventually, though it may bother her when she takes it a step too far for years to come. Concussion still doesn’t feel like a big enough word for all that it is. 

A brain injury that tore apart her insides. A bleed against soft tissue that erased everything she needed to understand the code set before her. An inch away from the end of her life. A concussion, like what happened in a soccer game when she was nine and tried to head the ball, but ended up connecting more with the goal post than the ball.

Unstoppable force meets an immovable object, and how is it that she gets to remember that, but not the way her wife likes her eggs in the morning, and how is it that she can learn that piece of information, but she can never really learn how she felt to marry her? 

A concussion, like people get every day of every year, and it was her life that tore open and drifted into the horizon where sirens met the asphalt. 

It's not fair. It isn’t big enough. Not much is. Tobin hisses when she pulls blackened at the edges garlic bread from the oven, and Christen laughs, chiding her for using the tea towel instead of the oven mit. That's something she’s allowed to do; chide her, tease her for the obvious. She would be allowed to reach across the space and cradle her palm while checking for blisters too. 

Maybe Christen could be allowed to do a lot of things. Maybe she should stop framing it in terms of permission. 

Tobin hides her smile by ducking her head as she serves the pasta, which Christen already knows will be a little stiff on the edges and soupy with water, because Tobin might never have said it in words, but it's become clear that their former arrangement had Christen in the chef’s hat and Tobin as the dishwasher. Christen doesn’t remember how to cook, though. Tobin can still wash a mean dish. 

“Bon appetit,” Tobin mumbles, pushing the bowl of pasta across the bench at her, a little smile playing across her face. Christen returns it, swirling her fork through the sauce and the falling apart, store bought ravioli. 

She takes a bite. It isn’t good, but Tobin’s looking at her with such care, the pots and pans of her effort still on the stove behind her that Christen can’t help but feel anything except the overwhelming surge of gratitude in her chest would be appropriate.

“Thank you,” Christen says emphatically. Tobin blinks at her, a little surprised. Morena presses her nose against Christen’s calf, pleading eyes gazing up at her asking for just one bite. Just a scrap of something.

“Course,” Tobin shrugs, stabbing into her own meal, a curious sort of warmth in the lines of her eyes. This, Christen thinks, is what it means to make her happy, as she has promised she does. If Christen can make Tobin happy by simply saying her name, then it feels right that Tobin can make Christen happy by cooking badly every single night and meaning it every single time. Christen pats Morena’s head in a long drag and slips her a piece of pasta under the bench while Tobin pretends not to see. 

In college, Christen and Allie used to sit and eat on the couch, chattering about episodes of reality TV. Now, she sits across a kitchen bench and feels grateful for tiny little things. The same things, in a way, she had before without a thought. She misses the thought. 

“I want to see Ali,” Christen says bluntly. Tobin blinks up at her, pausing mid-bite. 

Tobin swallows, still looking at her carefully as she takes a sip of her water, “Yeah, sure. You should call her.” 

“We’re...” Christen pauses, dragging her fork along the bottom of the bowl. It makes an awful scratching sound, loud enough to drown out the burst of questions inside her head that seem to have made a home from her mind. “We’re still friends, right? It’s not… different?”

Tobin smiles at her sadly, “Everythings different, Chris. Doesn’t mean it isn’t still good.”

Christen believes that in the exact ways that she doesn’t buy it at all. How was she meant to wrap it in a pretty little digestible bow? She believes it in the sense of acceptance. That all things change and grow again. In the ways that trees sink their roots to the ground where one day something new will grow. Maybe a million years from now, but one day nonetheless. 

She disbelieves it in the places she once cried over the tree that fell down in a storm by her house, certain that this loss was the greatest of her life. Disbelieves it in the places where the metal of her car is still embedded in what remains of a tree by the roadside. 

The tree might not ever grow back, but something will. Christen lets herself die, feels herself come alive. 

“Tell me about it,” Christen says, “Please.”

“Chris you don’t-”

“I want to be your partner in this, Tobin. You said it was an epilogue, but I don’t believe that. This is still part of the story.” Christen says, decisive, sure that this is what she wants. Tobin’s jaw works, clenching with hesitation. “I might not ever remember, but-”

“But you might.”

“I can’t live the rest of my life waiting for something that might not ever happen,” She says. She doesn’t feel sad for once, not because of the parts of herself she can’t remember, but for the look in Tobin’s eyes that says _‘but I would, I would wait forever, and if that's a chokehold on you then I will wait even longer.’_ She hurts not for what she doesn’t remember, but for what Tobin does, and what she’s been robbed of. “I just want to know where I’m going.”

Tobin smiles at her sadly, “Take me with you though, yeah?” 

“I’m trying,” And for once, it feels true, and for once, Tobin seems to trust her for it. 

  
  


***

When Christen was twenty-six, she almost drowned. Well, maybe. She thinks. It’s hard to be sure, in the cold light of day and absence. In the loneliness of her mind, very little and everything is possible all at once. 

No, it happened. She can still feel the water on her skin and the terror of life taken from her with the current, enough warning to kill on its own. It happened. She’s sure. So it happened _before_. 

When Christen was twenty-six, she was under a wave, and her ankles ached. A cramp. A cut. A side effect. She probably couldn’t tell you then.

It had filled her lungs with a violent thunder, up and down, up and away, an angry swirl of seafoam. The blue of the water made itself known while it flooded into her eyes and her mouth. Right in the centre of the coastal island. Somewhere tropical. Something beautiful, and Christen almost died. 

All she thought, all the while, was that this was it, a thrashing end to her barely lived life. That she had to survive. That she needed air like she would later need water. That this couldn’t be the end. Not this. Not now. That she needed to break the surface, to see the sky and feel the grass and live because where there was no air was not for her. That she needed to live and she wasn’t going to make it a second longer. That she needed… something, somewhere. 

Someone. 

Hands that smelt like margaritas and coconut oil and love dug crescent moons into her wrists, sea salt rough hair flicking against her cheek, somebody else's sunscreen merging with hers.

She didn’t drown. She knows that much. Or else this is heaven. 

She told the story a year later to her Dad, an empty chair beside her, with horror and faithful, friendly laughter. She said, “It was wild. Like, super scary.” And Christen didn’t die that time. Hasn’t since. 

It predates forgetting everything, and why is it always death that makes it through? 

She was only twenty-six. Far too young to die. 

***

Ali doesn’t live in a dorm or an off-campus apartment anymore. That makes sense. Christen lives in a tin hat house in suburbia with a dog and a wife and weeds that climb up around the edges. The hose always drips, and there are stains under rugs. There's no reason that Ali should be anywhere that makes sense. Not in the world where all of these things are tangible and real. 

Ali lives in a big white house with a patterned roof and a whole lot of marble. Two dogs slobber at her heels when a front door decked out in stain glass swings open, Ali holding them back with her heel. It's a nice place. Pretty. Front facing and put together. Very Ali.

It’s a long way from their roadside couch and faded walls, but she supposes all in all that this was meant to be the horizon they rode off into. 

It still requires some reordering in her head, as if she needs a moment to calculate, to explain that where the world folds like dog-eared paper in its edges, she seeks explanation. It feels a little like a parallel. The world almost but not quite the same, unfinished and unrendered. It's the same smile on her best friend's face when the door swings open, but it's a different carpet, and her hair is a shade lighter, inches shorter. 

Christen needs a moment to reconcile the fact with the fiction. The present with the past. That both these things can be true, can have happened and be happening, and go on to happen all over again. 

Tobin presses the tips of her fingers to the base of her spine, a pace behind her at the doorstep. Reconciliation comes easier when she’s around, for as much as she prompts the need for it. 

“Christen,” Ali sighs, smiling wide. Her knuckles are white around the doorframe, her body leaning forward across the threshold almost unconsciously. “I’ve missed you.”

Christen smiles back, “Me too,” 

“We would’ve come to visit but Tobin said-”

“Don’t blame me for you being a bad friend, man,” Tobin shakes her head dramatically, pushing past Ali and into the house, glancing back at Christen with a wink. 

“You _said-_ ”

“Nah, Al. We waited at the door, you never showed. Devastating, honestly,” Tobin cuts her off, stepping out of her coat, brushing Christen’s hair out of one of her buttons as she does the same. Her smile lilts playfully, unfolding like joyful flowers in the summer. Christen likes her this way. “Is Ash cooking?”

“She’s trying to,” Ali shrugs with a fond roll of her eyes. She shuts the door behind them gently, turning to face Christen with a clear and calm look. “Ashlyn and I are married. You’ll like her.” 

“Don’t I already?” It's meant to be a joke. It feels like a question. Tobin’s smile goes a little distant. 

Ali watches her consideringly, choosing her words carefully before deciding with “Does it matter? If we’re starting over, we better do it right.”

Christen blinks at her. She likes the sound of that. She glances back at Tobin, who watches her gently. It's a little haunted, a little skeletal under the bravado. As if the Tobin that used to be is fading out, but her eyes are warm butter, melting into a sweet goo, and Christen thinks she could get this right, with Tobin’s help. 

Ali claps her hands together, “Come on. Before Ash ruins my pots.” 

***

When Christen was twenty-seven and a half, a car slammed its breaks right in front of her as she took off from the traffic lights. She was in the passenger seat, someone slammed the brakes on. There was a scratch on the bumper and harsh breathing in the cabin of a near death.

Something warm settled on her knee, a check in. A _‘are you still here?’_ A _‘wake up, come back to me, be here.’_

She said, “Shit, dude.” 

She was fine, beyond a light seatbelt burn and a stiff neck. 

She didn’t die that time. It must’ve been _before_. 

***

Ali was right. She does like Ashlyn. She’s loud and she gives Tobin shit, tossing a tea towel at her head when she tries to steal bites of the carrots Christen has been put to work cutting. She also introduces herself when Christen walks into the room, smiles friendly and open. 

Christen says, “It's nice to know you,” as her introduction. 

She’s made enough people sad with the word ‘ _meet_ ’ to know better. ‘Know’ makes Ashlyn’s eyebrows jump to the top of her head and a grin spreads across her face. 

“Same Chris,” Ashlyn declares over her shoulder at Ali, who only laughs and drapes an arm over Christen’s shoulders. 

Ashlyn’s warm, and she hip checks Christen gently to get to the drawer she’s standing in front of. She also looks at Ali like she’s the entire world in the palm of her hand, and how could Christen not like someone that treats her friend like that? Christen wonders if that’s how Ali must see Tobin and her. It feels like a description that fits. 

It’s nice to have people that treat her like they’ve known each for years in a way that still feels exploratory. As if they can emote a language a thousand years old and still ask for her middle name. Death always lasts but it's the feeling that comes in first each and every time. A nice gold medal around the neck of love, glistening in the stadium lights. That could be why the shiny athletes on their pedestals always mouthed their greetings to their mothers when the camera landed on them. That love crossed the line before the champion. 

Ali smacks Ashlyn on the shoulder lightly over certain jokes and Tobin snorts into her wine. Christen pats her on the back when it dissolves into a coughing fit. It's easier not to drown when she’s surrounded by people that don’t mind if she doesn’t remember every sunrise they’ve seen together. A buoyancy of casual compassion. 

“You know,” Ashlyn declares, halfway through a dessert of cheesecake Christen’s been slicing pieces off in thin lines with the edge of her spoon. Ali cuts Ashlyn a wary look. “I don’t even remember 80% of my childhood, so I kinda get it.” 

Ali squeezes her eyes shut, rubbing her thumbs against her temple. Tobin tosses a napkin at her, almost aggressively. She sighs when she says, “Dude, it’s totally different.” 

“I remember my childhood.” Christen says, unbothered, licking the centre of her spoon, tracing after the last chocolate smudge. Tobin watches her heavily. It rushes straight to Christen’s head. 

“That wasn’t, like, totally my point.” Tobin says, a little furrow appears between her eyebrows. 

“ _But it’s true_ ,” Christen shrugs. Tobin’s lips twitch, bemused despite the echoing of her own words. 

“No but,” Ashlyn insists, “We went surfing that time and I hit my head on the board, and I think it gave me memory loss because I don’t even remember going home that day. So, I get it, sis. Sort of.”

“That was five years ago. That’s why you don’t remember the trip home,” Christen mutters with a laugh, carving off another piece of cheesecake. Her laughter feels louder than it should be, and when she glances up, spoon halfway to her mouth, all three of them are staring. 

Tobin clears her throat, “How do you… know that?”

Christen’s never surfed. Vaguely remembers the basics of bouncing through waves on a foam board, laughter in the sea filled wind behind her. She wasn’t there for Ashlyn making a fool of herself in the middle of an ocean, though. The words were right there on the tip of her tongue anyway, and she blinks back. 

“Someone told me about it, I guess,” She shrugs, uncertain, because it’s not a big deal 

“Yeah,” Tobin states, “I did. When it happened. Five years ago.” 

Christen swallows. Tobin stares at her. Ashlyn sips her wine loudly. 

“Strange.” Ali says pointedly. She turns to Christen with a deliberate smile, “Where did you get your dress, Chris?” 

Ali snorts when Christen says, “I have literally no idea, Al.”

Tobin watches her throughout the rest of dinner, and Christen never finishes the rest of her cheesecake, instead focusing on pinpointing where her words came from. It's a fruitless effort, the memory slipping away like water every second she tries to grasp it. It's harder to drown when you can’t get your head beneath the water. Nothing to fill her lungs but easy air when she opens it, awaiting the flood. 

The tip of her tongue is red raw from biting, expectation signed into it. She’d like for it to have a job beyond this waiting game. Would like to fill the room with all the words she’s never said. The ones she’d regret missing if she knew all the regrets she carried now. If she could, she would paint it into the walls, so every day of every life someone would be forced to hear the things she thinks, marked up to the ceiling so she might never be forced quiet again. 

Let her scream and scream until they all know the soul she’d forgotten how to hold; let it slip down into her toes without retrieval. Little by little, Christen picks it up and pulls it back to her chest, a sheet ghost revealed. 

*

She helps Ali with the dishes, scraping off plates and dropping them into soapy water. Tobin and Ashlyn banished to the living room to argue over a football game. 

There's a shiny dishwasher in the corner, but Ali scrubs at each dish individually. Christen doesn’t question it. She mostly understands. It can be nice to have something to do with your hands that feels like yours alone. To be submerged in the fruits of your labour. Even if it does prune your hands. Even if Christen does, personally, find it her most hated job. 

“Sorry about Ash, with the memory thing,” Ali says, not glancing up from the plate she’s washing. Christen dries one of the forks, rubbing along each individual spike carefully. 

“It’s fine,” Christen shrugs. It should have bothered her more than it did. She can’t be mad at intent though. Not when it's softer to laugh at it and soothe her hackles down. “I guess she’s your Tobin?” 

Ali smiles, eyes crinkling at the edges. She shakes her head a little. Not quite a no, just a twinge of amused understanding. “She’s my Ashlyn. Tobin’s your Tobin.”

Christen hums consideringly at that, another folded edge of a puzzle piece slotted in a barely fitted space, the picture coming together overblown and a little clumsy. Tobin being uniquely hers though, that she can understand.

“I love her, don’t I?” She poses it like a question, which she isn’t sure is one. 

“You’re the only one that could tell me that, Chris,” Ali says with a shake of her head.

Christen purses her lips, “The old Christen could.”

They’re not quite the same person. The woman wearing the clothes and the one who bought them. Christen is growing tired of this funeral of one. Is ready to stop glancing over her shoulder fearing and wishing for herself. 

“Hey,” Ali says, firm, dropping the plate she’s washing and turning to look at Christen head on, “You’re the same Christen, you just aren’t quite caught up. The part of you that knows everything doesn’t exist. So, if you love Tobin, that's on you. That's your choice to make, babe.” 

“Is it a choice? I didn’t ask for this.” 

“You’re still here. Seems like a choice enough for me,” Ali shrugs, “But if you don’t love her, that’s fine too. Whatever you feel and whatever parts of this world you want to redo, that's your prerogative. Tobin will be a part of it for as long as you let her, as long as you want to, but you don’t have to make her fit if she doesn’t.” 

“Are you _telling_ me to leave her?” Christen frowns, confused because that thought doesn’t sit right with her. 

Christen has been so patient, but is also so tired. She doesn’t want to wait for Tobin to love her right anymore. Or for her to know the why and the how of loving her. She just wants to love her well and see if that is enough to propel them along the merry little path.

“It’s not really about Tobin in the end, is it? You wouldn’t be fighting so hard to be the person she loves if it was,” Ali says, as if it should all be that easy. 

Maybe it is. 

***

So, if she loves her. Let’s start there. If she loves her, she would put everything in the shadow of that feeling. A long crossing line of feelings and future through the zigzag of affection. She would cross streets thinking of the house they might have and bake bread to keep her belly warm. 

If she loves her, and she might, she would sometimes retreat, would sometimes ignore, would sometimes love her own reflection a little much and fear the things she can’t fathom. The things that have been and gone and won’t come back no matter how much she wishes they would. 

If she loves her, it wouldn’t fix whatever broke when Christen did. If she loves her, there would be a stress fracture in her heart that poked into her edges, frayed on her airways. It would hurt, it would always hurt. Sometimes a lot, largely a little. There would be days when the pain of loving her would feel incomprehensible, incorrigible. She would want to blow it down and blow it away, dismantle whatever she’d given and take it for herself, because why should it hurt so much to feel so small? 

There would be moments when it didn’t hurt so badly, though. There would be moments when Tobin made pasta, or when she took her to look at a wall of plastic rocks that they’d never climbed. There would be times when Tobin slept on the couch because that was where she was needed, touchingly close, desperately far away, and Christen would hurt, but to love her wouldn’t. Underneath it all, there would be a flower of care, the weeds could be cut away carefully. 

These are all things Christen has had and felt without holding. And it hurt. And it was bad. And it continues to worsen with a coloured sky of bettereance. And there were a million second firsts to it all without enough lasts to keep that pain as fresh as it deserves to be. And she doesn’t remember. 

And she loves her. It’s only part of the point. Adoration and affection and unyielding wonder coming first. Loving being a culmination of sorts. A mixtape of how she feels. 

If she loves her, she already does. Not because she did, but because when she looks at her every day she feels it grow where something pained and grey used to lay. She doesn’t know the will to it, but she knows the way. 

It's not a before sort of thing. 

***

When Christen was twenty, she loved Tobin. She isn’t sure if that's a memory or a feeling or a piece of knowledge someone else put in her head.   
  
She remembers the slide of skin and a _‘yes.’_

She remembers a beach somewhere in Hawaii, coconuts and rum. She remembers laughing as she flew through the air. Doesn’t remember landing, just the swoop in her belly before. Remembers someone's hand spread open in that same space, thinking she could fit and everything else the body had to offer inside of her. 

Remembers being young and kissing in a nightclub. Remembers being young and standing in concrete rain. Remembers how much it hurt. God, it hurt, when she was stumbling drunk and couldn’t fall. God, but it had stung, when she fell asleep in someone's arms. God, oh lord, had it made her feel as if her skin was peeling from the centre of herself when someone had said, _‘I love you, Chris, don’t you get that?’_

It doesn’t feel like a memory. It feels like a touch. But she remembers how it felt, so she thinks it must’ve been the _before_. 

***

Tobin is quiet when they get back from dinner at Ali and Ashlyn’s. She doesn’t play music in the car, the only beat being kept was the drumming of her fingers against the wheel. Christen drank more wine than her, and she feels as stripped open and raw as she does loopy and easy. She can’t help but wonder if Tobin’s fingers would match the phantom feeling she can’t shake.

Not quite a memory. Not quite fiction. Touch and language before anything else. Just the whispers of words. Tobin stays quiet, Christen keeps her hands to herself. There’s something about asking for permission that makes touch feel sacred, treasurable. 

Tobin drops her keys in the bowl by the door, kicking off her shoes with a soft thud. Both of their coats are draped over her arm, Christen hadn’t wanted to put hers back on when they left, and she drops them over the back of the couch. Her blankets are kicked to the end of it, her pillow still stuffed on the other side. 

Sleeping on the couch can’t be good for her neck. Christen doesn’t like to think of Tobin walking around in any more pain than what she can’t control.  
  


Morena pants up at them with a dopey smile from where she’s curled up in the armchair. She’s not really allowed on the furniture, but Christen just scratches her head affectionately. 

“Are you alright?” Christen asks into the almost quiet of their house. The fridge buzzes loudly and one of the kitchen lights flickers erratically. 

Tobin nods, a tiny gesture as she pours herself a glass of water. She raises it at Christen in a silent question, sipping at it only after Christen shakes her head no. 

“You remembered something,” Tobin says simply, when her glass is half empty. 

Christen shakes her head, “No. Not really.”

“Something though. You have something,” Tobin insists. “When we were at the mall and I was looking at paintbrushes, you called it an ‘artists itch’.”

Christen tries to conjure the image up. She has a vague recollection of watching Tobin staring longingly at the paintbrushes, of teasing her for it. She shrugs loosely. Tobin watches her keenly.

“Yeah. But that’s, that’s how I used to explain it whenever I bought art stuff and you gave me shit for it. We used to joke, like, when we did the budget for the month you’d put money aside for art stuff under the heading ‘artists itch.’ And you said it the other day,” Tobin says, face creasing in concentration. 

“I didn’t,” Christen lets out a frustrated breath, “It just felt right.” 

“Why is _that_ what feels right to you? Why don’t I ever feel right?” Tobin says breathless, turning her back and placing her empty glass in the sink delicately. It's a violent thing to say, but Christen hears the despair. 

“I didn’t… I never chose this,” Christen huffs. Tobin was thrust upon her one day. Appearing in her life through a door Christen doesn’t remember ever closing, ever opening, even ever knowing she had. She is a ghost story coming to fruition that Christen never got a say in. 

“You did-” Tobin’s voice breaks, as if Christen is tugging each word out from the depths of her insides and with the last of her composure, “I was there, it happened, you can’t just, you can’t decide that my memories aren’t there just because yours aren’t. It isn’t fair.” 

“None of this is fair, Tobin. None of it,” Christen says, fighting to keep her tone level, but the bite appears nonetheless. “You weren’t hurt the way I was, and now you just want me to get over it so you won’t have to hurt in a new way, and that’s not reasonable. It's not realistic.” 

Tobin looks at her as if Christen has just gutted her, taken a paring knife and cut her open end to end. Christen knows she’s right. She knows she doesn’t want to be. It is what it is. It doesn’t have to be. The whole thing is contradictions and lifelines and lovelines. A messy web she can’t untangle all alone while Tobin stands to the side and tells her how it used to be, wistful for a bendable wire that tracked its own way to the socket, unwilling to try and fix what they had now, while Christen tried to cut pieces from the middle and find a way out of the clutches. 

“I am hurt,” Tobin says, her voice is strained. “Every single day it feels like my throat is burning and my lungs are fucking gone, and I can’t breathe, because I don’t want to if you don’t care if I do. And that isn’t fair. It's not fair for it to be true, and it isn’t fair that I’m telling you, and like, I’m sorry, Chris, but I can’t, I can’t do anything to fix this.” 

Christen blinks at her, trying to run the words through her mind, but they slip by like water, a few sinking into cracks and crevices, the rest unmalleable and unmoored. “What if we didn’t fix it?” 

Tobin freezes for a moment, stricken, the colour draining from her face. One of her hands reaches out and desperately grabs the back of the chair in front of her, white knuckled grip propping her up and bending her forward. She gasps, and Christen wants to reach out and give comfort, wants to smooth a hand over her hair and promise she's misunderstood.

It strikes her, as Tobin’s eyes go glassy, that she can, and so she does. She crosses the space between them to curl her hand over Tobin’s where it grips the chair, her other hand bracing between her shoulder blades. Tobin stares at her. 

“You want to leave,” Tobin says numbly. A statement, not a question. 

The thing is; Christen did. She woke up everyday and considered running for the hills. She wanted an annulment and she wanted a flight path. She wanted a time machine. She wanted a lot of things that amounted to ‘not Tobin.’ She wanted to leave.

The thing is; Tobin’s using present tense, like she wants to now, in this moment, in that statement. Wants to stop trying to fix this, abandon it on the street corner, so she can give up and walk away. Find a new project far away from this life. 

The thing is; Christen’s using past tense, because she doesn’t. She wants to stay and even out Tobin’s breathing. She wants to play scrabble with Tobin and have her drive her to work in the mornings. She wants to be alive just to make sure Tobin is happy every morning. She wants to stay. 

Christen doesn’t want to fix this, but she wants to stay. 

“I didn’t choose this,” she says, soothing even as Tobin’s eyes narrows and her breath falters at her words, running her thumb over Tobin’s knuckles. She takes a deep breath and feels bold enough to say, “But I could.”

Tobin looks at her like a heart stain, blinking back the glassiness of her eyes, a shuddered breath falling from her lips. The sunrise of understanding. The new beginning. Christen doesn’t have to think about it, doesn’t have to remember or memorise or fictionalise. It doesn’t matter what bells and whistles she wants to shovet, she trusts Tobin enough to give her this.

She feels a four letter word enough to want her to have it. 

This thing in her chest serves a purpose beyond keeping her alive. This thing in her chest keeps her alive only to let her love Tobin right and fine. This thing in her chest would be silent if it didn’t beat in time with the drum that she marches to and the beat that is hers alone. 

Tobin is the lighthouse, and Christen will paint her a brand new coat of red and white stripes every summer for the rest of her life as thanks for leading her to a harbour she never wanted to find. 

Tobin swallows thickly, “Will you?” 

Christen smiles and wonders how she doesn’t know. That she spent what feels like a whole lifetime but is just verging on being four months since she lost her car and her life trying to choose Tobin over and over again. Failing only by choosing to wait and let some Christen who will never come back again to pick her. 

She’s misspoken, it isn’t a could, it's a have.

“Always,” She says, because Christen might not remember falling in love with Tobin, but she remembers the catch. 

***

Tobin stops sleeping on the couch. Christen finds that the slant of her mouth tastes like coconut and home. 

Christen doesn’t remember all that much. She tells her a joke and Tobin calls her a joke thief for a week while Christen desperately tries to insist she’s never heard it before. Before is such an ugly, ever changing word. She’s getting used to living beside it. 

***

“Hey,” Tobin says over a plate of toast one morning, “I want to be, uh, clear about something.”

Christen raises an eyebrow, setting down her teacup, “You’ve never been clear about anything in your life.”

“Shut up,” Tobin says fondly, “This is a serious one.”

“Go ahead,” Christen says with a wave of her hand, twisting her teacup around on the coaster, aligning the handle with the grain of the wood. 

“It’s okay, if you don’t remember. And it's okay if you’re not okay with that,” Tobin says. She looks a little pale. “I know I said that before, but I was kinda lying then, so I’m… I’m not going to pretend I’ll just want whatever you want, because that's like, total bullshit half the time, and what I want is always going to be you. But this is me taking both hands off the wheel, I’m just glad I had you for a minute in time. That was pretty unlikely in the scheme of things anyway, wasn’t it?” 

Christen is all cried out, but there’s a sting to her vision that feels like love and loss and evergreen devotion. Tobin tears off one of her crusts nervously in the quiet left behind by her declaration, so Christen says, “That was a bad taste metaphor.” 

Tobin brow furrows, and Christen can see her backtracking through everything she’s said. She might know her just a little after all. When she seems to settle on what exactly it is that Christen is mocking her for expression clears. 

“Dude, shut _up_.”

Christen laughs and grasps Tobin’s hand across the table. It only seems fair. 

Christen doesn’t remember. Christen feels alive.

*

When Christen was an unidentified age, in an unidentified year on Christmas Eve, Tobin lent her head against her shoulder, naked skin on naked skin in her childhood bed and gasped, “Marry me.” Tobin had looked at her stupidly when they were young and babyfaced and said, “you’re bleeding.” Tobin had yelled at her in a club bathroom once, saying, “Just take me seriously, would you?” Tobin had cried into her shoulder and said, “It's nothing.” Tobin had looked down at her phone in her outstretched hand and said, “Grow up, Chris, she’s your best friend.” Tobin had said, “I love you”, had said, “I love you too,” had, said “Love you,” 

  
Tobin had said, “Marry me?” in the middle of sex in her childhood bed. And Christen knows the words and the touch and the image as if she was there. She was there. Her name is tattooed on the sky and in the background of every day and age, right next to Tobin’s.

She sees the photo in that album in a dizzy haze, but she lives the feeling of Tobin’s skin on hers and the outrage in her stomach at the absolute gall of it. Stupid, now. Stupid, when she’s living a world where saying anything but ‘please’ to Tobin feels like a hurt of its own. Stupid all on its own, though. 

It's something that comes to her forcefully, and Christen is too angry, too shocked and burning with the rage she’d felt then to even think about it. She overflows with it. The final last gust of water before it reaches her lungs. Instead, she tosses the book she’s been reading from her lap and bursts into Tobin’s office. 

Morena’s head perks up from where she’s curled in the corner of the couch, whining in concern at the sudden interruption to her ignorance, barking Christen out of the room. 

“Tobin,” Christen says. Tobin doesn’t look up, raising an eyebrow and tilting her head to the left a little, a silent show of listening. Christen is done with silence. “Tobin.”

“Yeah?” She mutters, still tapping away at the keyboard.

“Tobin,” Christen draws everything she has into the name. Throws every last tendril of anger and love she has into the vowels and the consonants, the only name she knows beyond her own with any reverence, the only thing she ever needed to know. 

Tobin looks up, eyebrows furrowed together, and Christen can barely hold back a sob. “You proposed in the middle of sex on Christmas Eve and got mad at me when I said no, because that’s an awful way to propose.” 

“It was _heartfelt_ ,” Tobin hisses, and then pulls herself up short, staring at Christen as if a ghost has suddenly drifted through her body. In a way, Christen feels as if it has. “Who told you that?”

“No one,” Tobin blinks at her, unseeing, awakened. Walking through a room of blindness to a single focal point and then, she begins to cry. 

***

The Doctor smiles at her, a latex glove holding cold fingers when it squeezes her arm in congratulations. Tobin looks teary eyed when she confirms it's a good sign. Not everything. Only phrases and moments and faces, this in sharper clarity than the rest. 

“That’s enough. That’s more than I needed,” Tobin says in the car on the way home, careful driving that watches every movement of the road, when Christen tells her she doesn’t really remember beyond an echo of a few things and a proposal.

Christen thinks Tobin probably didn’t need much more than Christen alive and well. Alive and willing to try and choose. Which she had. She always would.

Christen wouldn’t need much more than Tobin not caring either way. 

There is an after without a before and there is love without memory of the fall. Christen can scale every fake mountain, cut her leg on every plastic rock, and Tobin can drop to her knees every day of their lives asking that she just remember, but there is nothing that will prompt the feeling all on its own.

Feeling, she has found, is the last defense against the truth. The truth is only bare skinned fiction. She’s happy to be clothed and loved, rather than naked and nothing. 

***

A collection of things Christen recovered from the fire. Not a lot. Just a little. Tobin. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [my tumblr, where I will kiss you delicately on the forehead daily](https://softnoirr.tumblr.com/)

**Author's Note:**

> My tumblr is softnoirr


End file.
